Big Data Glossary

Chapter 8. Machine Learning

Another important processing category, machine learning systems automate decision making on data. They use training information to deal with subsequent data points, automatically producing outputs like recommendations or groupings. These systems are especially useful when you want to turn the results of a one-off data analysis into a production service that will perform something similar on new data without supervision. Some of the most famous uses of these techniques are features like Amazon’s product recommendations.

WEKA

WEKA is a Java-based framework and GUI for machine learning algorithms. It provides a plug-in architecture for researchers to add their own techniques, with a command-line and window interface that makes it easy to apply them to your own data. You can use it to do everything from basic clustering to advanced classification, together with a lot of tools for visualizing your results. It is heavily used as a teaching tool, but it also comes in extremely handy for prototyping and experimenting outside of the classroom. It has a strong set of preprocessing tools that make it easy to load your data in, and then you have a large library of algorithms at your fingertips, so you can quickly try out ideas until you find an approach that works for your problem. The command-line interface allows you to apply exactly the same code in an automated way for production.

Mahout

Mahout is an open source framework that can run common machine learning algorithms ...