On Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:43:03 -0400 zaki rahaman <zaki.raha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds good, I'd love to take a look at an outline. I too would love > to see a cookbook style manual which focuses more on the details of > implementation, how to optimize systems, best practices, etc. and > fills in with some of the theory material where appropriate/needed. Given the number of problems one might want to solve with Mahout: I think for each task presented in the book we should also be able to give guidelines on which constraints influence which exact algorithm works best for a given problem setting. Example: Currently we already have quite a few clustering algorithms. Each has several knobs for parameter tuning. In addition data can be prepared differently before running the algorithms. If I were a reader of the book, user of Mahout I imagine I would love to learn some general guidelines (if these exist) as to which algorithm with which settings performs best for my problem setting. Or at least learn ways to find those settings. I know that, at least to some extend, this is still an open research questions. But I am quite certain we have enough people in our community to contribute best practices from various projects. Isabel
