Scalable Econometrics on Big Data -- The Logistic Regression on Spark

Abstract

Extra-large datasets are becoming increasingly accessible, and computing tools designed to handle huge amount of data efficiently are democratizing rapidly. However, conventional statistical and econometric tools are still lacking fluency when dealing with such large datasets. This paper dives into econometrics on big datasets, specifically focusing on the logistic regression on Spark. We review the robustness of the functions available in Spark to fit logistic regression and introduce a package that we developed in PySpark which returns the statistical summary of the logistic regression, necessary for statistical inference.