Apache Mahout: Highly Scalable Machine Learning Algorithms

The Apache Mahout project, a set of highly scalable machine-learning libraries, recently announced it's first public release. InfoQ spoke with Grant Ingersoll, co-founder of Mahout and a member of the technical staff at Lucid Imagination, to learn more about this project and machine learning in general. In describing what machine learning was, Ingersoll quoted Introduction To Machine Learning by Ethem Alpaydin, "Machine Learning is programming computers to optimize a performance criterion using example data or past experience". When asked to describe sample applications for some of these algorithms, Ingersoll indicated that the Taste filtering provided recommendations of items that a user would like based on their preferences, such as movie recommendations. Clustering is used to group together arbitrary data into categories of similar items, with the grouping of similar news stories being an example of this.