Mahout over Jython - some examples

This tutorial provides some sample code illustrating how we can read and write sequence files containing Mahout vectors from Python using JPype. This tutorial is intended for people who want to use Python for analyzing and plotting Mahout data. Using Mahout from Python turns out to be quite easy.

This tutorial concerns the use of cPython (cython) as opposed to Jython. JPython wasn’t an option for me, because (to the best of my knowledge) JPython doesn’t work with Python extensions numpy, matplotlib, or h5py which I rely on heavily.

The instructions below explain how to setup a python script to read and write the output of Mahout clustering.

You will first need to download and install the JPype package for python.

The first step to setting up JPype is determining the path to the dynamic library for the jvm ; on linux this will be a .so file on and on windows it will be a .dll.

In your python script, create a global variable with the path to this dll

Next we need to figure out how we need to set the classpath for mahout. The easiest way to do this is to edit the script in “bin/mahout” to print out the classpath. Add the line “echo $CLASSPATH” to the script somewhere after the comment “run it” (this is line 195 or so). Execute the script to print out the classpath. Copy this output and paste it into a variable in your python script. The result for me looks like the following

Now we can create a function to start the jvm in python using jype

jvm=None
def start_jpype():
global jvm
if (jvm is None):
cpopt="-Djava.class.path={cp}".format(cp=classpath)
startJVM(jvmlib,"-ea",cpopt)
jvm="started"

Writing Named Vectors to Sequence Files from Python

We can now use JPype to create sequence files which will contain vectors to be used by Mahout for kmeans. The example below is a function which creates vectors from two Gaussian distributions with unit variance.

def create_inputs(ifile,*args,**param):
 """Create a sequence file containing some normally distributed
	ifile - path to the sequence file to create
 """
 
 #matrix of the cluster means
 cmeans=np.array([[1,1] ,[-1,-1]],np.int)
 
 nperc=30  #number of points per cluster
 
 vecs=[]
 
 vnames=[]
 for cind in range(cmeans.shape[0]):
  pts=np.random.randn(nperc,2)
  pts=pts+cmeans[cind,:].reshape([1,cmeans.shape[1]])
  vecs.append(pts)
 
  #names for the vectors
  #names are just the points with an index
  #we do this so we can validate by cross-refencing the name with thevector
  vn=np.empty(nperc,dtype=(np.str,30))
  for row in range(nperc):
   vn[row]="c"+str(cind)+"_"+pts[row,0].astype((np.str,4))+"_"+pts[row,1].astype((np.str,4))
  vnames.append(vn)
  
 vecs=np.vstack(vecs)
 vnames=np.hstack(vnames)
 

 #start the jvm
 start_jpype()
 
 #create the sequence file that we will write to
 io=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.io 
 FileSystemCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem
 
 PathCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.fs.Path
 path=PathCls(ifile)

 ConfCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration 
 conf=ConfCls()
 
 fs=FileSystemCls.get(conf)
 
 #vector classes
 VectorWritableCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.VectorWritable
 DenseVectorCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.DenseVector
 NamedVectorCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.NamedVector
 writer=io.SequenceFile.createWriter(fs, conf, path,io.Text,VectorWritableCls)
 
 
 vecwritable=VectorWritableCls()
 for row in range(vecs.shape[0]):
  nvector=NamedVectorCls(DenseVectorCls(JArray(JDouble,1)(vecs[row,:])),vnames[row])
  #need to wrap key and value because of overloading
  wrapkey=JObject(io.Text("key "+str(row)),io.Writable)
  wrapval=JObject(vecwritable,io.Writable)
  
  vecwritable.set(nvector)
  writer.append(wrapkey,wrapval)
  
 writer.close()

Reading the KMeans Clustered Points from Python

Similarly we can use JPype to easily read the clustered points outputted by mahout.

def read_clustered_pts(ifile,*args,**param):
 """Read the clustered points
 ifile - path to the sequence file containing the clustered points
 """ 

 #start the jvm
 start_jpype()
 
 #create the sequence file that we will write to
 io=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.io 
 FileSystemCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem
 
 PathCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.fs.Path
 path=PathCls(ifile)

 ConfCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration 
 conf=ConfCls()
 
 fs=FileSystemCls.get(conf)
 
 #vector classes
 VectorWritableCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.VectorWritable
 NamedVectorCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.NamedVector
 
 
 ReaderCls=io.__getattribute__("SequenceFile$Reader") 
 reader=ReaderCls(fs, path,conf)
 

 key=reader.getKeyClass()()
 

 valcls=reader.getValueClass()
 vecwritable=valcls()
 while (reader.next(key,vecwritable)):	
  weight=vecwritable.getWeight()
  nvec=vecwritable.getVector()
  
  cname=nvec.__class__.__name__
  if (cname.rsplit('.',1)[1]=="NamedVector"):  
   print "cluster={key} Name={name} x={x}y={y}".format(key=key.toString(),name=nvec.getName(),x=nvec.get(0),y=nvec.get(1))
  else:
   raise NotImplementedError("Vector isn't a NamedVector. Need tomodify/test the code to handle this case.")

Reading the KMeans Centroids

Finally we can create a function to print out the actual cluster centers found by mahout,

def getClusters(ifile,*args,**param):
 """Read the centroids from the clusters outputted by kmenas
	   ifile - Path to the sequence file containing the centroids
 """ 

 #start the jvm
 start_jpype()
 
 #create the sequence file that we will write to
 io=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.io 
 FileSystemCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.fs.FileSystem
 
 PathCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.fs.Path
 path=PathCls(ifile)

 ConfCls=JPackage("org").apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration 
 conf=ConfCls()
 
 fs=FileSystemCls.get(conf)
 
 #vector classes
 VectorWritableCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.VectorWritable
 NamedVectorCls=JPackage("org").apache.mahout.math.NamedVector
 ReaderCls=io.__getattribute__("SequenceFile$Reader")
 reader=ReaderCls(fs, path,conf)
 

 key=io.Text()
 

 valcls=reader.getValueClass()

 vecwritable=valcls()
 
 while (reader.next(key,vecwritable)):	
  center=vecwritable.getCenter()
  
  print "id={cid}center={center}".format(cid=vecwritable.getId(),center=center.values)
  pass