Actually, from my point-of-view, the current interest & buzz surrounding Mahout is divided in two broad categories: "scientists", who are interested in the theoritical setup of machine learning algorithms based on map-reduce technologies "engineers", who have a technical or functionnal need that can be solved by machine learning tools such as Mahout.
I include myself in the 2nd category, but I tend to think that to successfully answer a business need I have in mind, I have to get a better grasp on the theoritical concepts underlying in Mahout. This mailing-list, and the book, as well as other ressources (such as Programming Collective Intelligence), are all great ressources. (sorry for this off-topic & non technical rant on this technical ML...) 2010/5/20 Sean Owen <[email protected]> > It looks like a big classifier. I'm guessing it's going to be pretty > great. It's such a natural fit with their infrastructure. > > Building out these underlying map-reduce implementations is great, but > in the end the useful thing is to wrap that up in an API that is > oriented towards a particular application. > > That's the hard part too -- how do you make such a general process > applicable to many types of data in many contexts with one general > framework or API? It looks like they may provide many particular > domain-specific APIs on top of this engine. That's what would be > really great. > > ... and I don't doubt people, on this list perhaps, are also > interested in building a series of specializations on top of Mahout to > orient it to specific domains and use cases. That's an interesting > business! > > On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Florent Empis <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hi, > > > > This is a new service by Google of supervised learning > > > http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/bigquery-and-prediction-api-get-more.html > > > > Anyone has thoughts on this? I'd say it seems pretty limited as of now, > but > > the details are scarce... > > > > Sorry for this slight off-topic... :) > > > > BR, > > > > Florent Empis > > >
