[Spark-4060] [MLlib] exposing special rdd functions to the public

Author: Niklas Wilcke <1wilcke@informatik.uni-hamburg.de>

Closes #2907 from numbnut/master and squashes the following commits:

7f7c767 [Niklas Wilcke] [Spark-4060] [MLlib] exposing special rdd functions to the public, #2907