Does CrossValidator in PySpark distribute the execution?

Question

I am playing with Machine Learning in PySpark and am using a RandomForestClassifier. I have used Sklearn till now. I am using CrossValidator to tune the parameters and get the best model. A sample code taken from Spark's website is below.

From what I have been reading, I do not understand whether spark distributes the parameter tuning as well or it is the same as in case of GridSearchCV of Sklearn.

Any help would really appreciated.

from pyspark.ml import Pipeline
from pyspark.ml.classification import LogisticRegression
from pyspark.ml.evaluation import BinaryClassificationEvaluator
from pyspark.ml.feature import HashingTF, Tokenizer
from pyspark.ml.tuning import CrossValidator, ParamGridBuilder

# Prepare training documents, which are labeled.
training = spark.createDataFrame([
    (0, "a b c d e spark", 1.0),
    (1, "b d", 0.0),
    (2, "spark f g h", 1.0),
    (3, "hadoop mapreduce", 0.0),
    (4, "b spark who", 1.0),
    (5, "g d a y", 0.0),
    (6, "spark fly", 1.0),
    (7, "was mapreduce", 0.0),
    (8, "e spark program", 1.0),
    (9, "a e c l", 0.0),
    (10, "spark compile", 1.0),
    (11, "hadoop software", 0.0)
], ["id", "text", "label"])

# Configure an ML pipeline, which consists of tree stages: tokenizer, hashingTF, and lr.
tokenizer = Tokenizer(inputCol="text", outputCol="words")
hashingTF = HashingTF(inputCol=tokenizer.getOutputCol(), outputCol="features")
lr = LogisticRegression(maxIter=10)
pipeline = Pipeline(stages=[tokenizer, hashingTF, lr])

# We now treat the Pipeline as an Estimator, wrapping it in a CrossValidator instance.
# This will allow us to jointly choose parameters for all Pipeline stages.
# A CrossValidator requires an Estimator, a set of Estimator ParamMaps, and an Evaluator.
# We use a ParamGridBuilder to construct a grid of parameters to search over.
# With 3 values for hashingTF.numFeatures and 2 values for lr.regParam,
# this grid will have 3 x 2 = 6 parameter settings for CrossValidator to choose from.
paramGrid = ParamGridBuilder() \
    .addGrid(hashingTF.numFeatures, [10, 100, 1000]) \
    .addGrid(lr.regParam, [0.1, 0.01]) \
    .build()

crossval = CrossValidator(estimator=pipeline,
                          estimatorParamMaps=paramGrid,
                          evaluator=BinaryClassificationEvaluator(),
                          numFolds=2)  # use 3+ folds in practice

# Run cross-validation, and choose the best set of parameters.
cvModel = crossval.fit(training)

Answer 1

Spark 2.3+

SPARK-21911 included parallel model fitting. The level of parallelism is controlled with parallelism Param.

Spark < 2.3

It does not. Cross validation is implemented as a plain nested for loop:

for i in range(nFolds):
    ...
    for j in range(numModels):
        ...

Only the process of training individual models is distributed.