1. Two new interfaces
In addition to the dplyr interface to Spark, sparklyr also contains two other interfaces.
2. The MLlib machine learning interface
The first interface supports access to Spark's machine learning library, MLlib, with "feature transformation" functions that begin ft_, and "machine learning" functions that begin ml_.
3. Feature transformations
You'll learn about feature transformation in this chapter. Feature transformation means changing the form of a column of your data frame, such as cutting a numeric field up into a categorical variable.
4. The Spark DataFrame interface
The other interface you'll learn about is the Spark DataFrame API. This provides useful methods for sorting, sampling, and partitioning your datasets.
5. Let's practice!