I am pleased to announce that I have been voted in as a committer on Apache Whirr! Whirr is a Java library for quickly setting up services in the cloud. For example, using Whirr you can start a Hadoop cluster on Amazon in 5 minutes by configuring a simple property file and running the whirr […]
Apache Whirr includes Mahout support
In a previous blog I showed you how to use Apache Whirr to launch a Hadoop cluster in order to run Mahout jobs. This blog shows you how to use the Mahout service from the brand new Whirr 0.7.0 release to automatically install Hadoop and the Mahout binary distribution on a cloud provider such as […]
Mahout at FOSDEM 2011 DataDevRoom
Last saturday, february 5th, FOSDEM 2011 hosted the DataDevRoom where talks were given on topics surrounding data analysis with free and open source software. I was there and gave an introductory talk on clustering with Apache Mahout. In case you missed the conference, read on to learn about some of the talks or checkout the […]
Mahout – Taste :: Part Three – Estimators
In Taste, estimators are the bridge between the generic item- or user recommendation logic and the specific similarity algorithm. Estimators are mainly used as part of the recommendation process, however, they are also used for evaluating recommenders. Additionally, the ‘recommended because’ feature is also powered by an estimator. This blog covers some Taste internals and […]
Mahout – Taste at Lucene Eurocon and Berlin Buzzwords
A little while ago, I was delighted to present two introductory Mahout – Taste talks, at Lucene Eurocon and Berlin Buzzwords. I received quite a lot of good feedback about the presentations and have been asked by a few attendees to post them. If you’re one of those attendees or you missed the presentation, you […]
Mahout – Taste :: Part Two – Getting started
This blog is a ‘getting started’ article and shows you how to build a simple web-based movie recommender with Mahout / Taste, Wicket and the Movielens dataset from Grouplens research group at the University of Minnesota. I will discuss which components you need, how to wire them up in Spring, and how to create a […]
Mahout – Taste :: Part 1 – Introduction
This post is the first in a series on Taste, a Java framework for providing personalized recommendations. Taste is part of the larger Mahout framework, which features various scalable machine-learning algorithms. In this post I introduce you to the concepts of personalized recommendations, also known as collaborative filtering. After this introduction, Taste’s architecture and extension […]