Friday, May 21, 2010

More Google Goodies

Russ pointed out two new Google APIs which are of particular interest. The Prediction API "enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes". It will take your labeled data, run supervised learning algorithms, and allow you to predict. I've not looked too hard, but I don't see just which ML algorithms they are offering (Naive Bayes, SVM, KNN, etc). But how cool is this? Well, pretty cool. But, Russ also points out BigQuery by Google: "a web service that enables you to do interactive analysis of massively large datasets. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand". Terrabytes, billions of rows per seconds. Wow.

Also check out Lessons learned developing a practical large scale machine learning system. And the first lesson? "Keep it simple (even at the expense of a little accuracy)".

Now these, all by themselves, are a really good reason to learn Python. :-)