Hi Matt, you can model the problem for price prediction as a time series problem. Currently Mahout has no direct support yet for time series like e.g. R http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/ts.html
Like Ted already said you have a kind of regression problem. Currently there are not a lot of people doing directly regression with mahout. Most of the classification implementation are also suitable for regression. Nevertheless if you do not have a Ph.D. in statistics it will be tough to transfer the classification algorithms to regression algorithms. I would currently say that a good start for you are ARIMA models: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_integrated_moving_average As far as I know there is no ARIMA implementation in Mahout. If you want to include events e.g. modeling the price drop of a certain product when the successor is introduced it becomes tricky. You can check out project Black Swan http://www.blackswanevents.org/ They try to correlate events like changing governments with e.g. tax increase. Here is also an answer from me directly for time series analysis: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/mahout-user/201112.mbox/%[email protected]%3E To sum it up: There is currently no good support for time series analysis in Mahout. Get you hands dirty and implement it or use R. Hope that helps Manuel On 27.12.2012, at 16:26, Matt Mitchell wrote: > I'm looking for a way to predict prices based on day of the week, and > possibly even buckets of days like weekends, holidays etc.. I have the data > (item-id, price, date) ... Does anyone have any advice for how to get > started with this using Mahout? > > Thanks, > Matt -- Manuel Blechschmidt M.Sc. IT Systems Engineering Dortustr. 57 14467 Potsdam Mobil: 0173/6322621 Twitter: http://twitter.com/Manuel_B
