Announcing Microsoft Machine Learning Library for Apache Spark

This post is authored by Roope Astala, Senior Program Manager, and Sudarshan Raghunathan, Principal Software Engineering Manager, at Microsoft. We're excited to announce the Microsoft Machine Learning library for Apache Spark – a library designed to make data scientists more productive on Spark, increase the rate of experimentation, and leverage cutting-edge machine learning techniques – including deep learning – on very large datasets. We've learned a lot by working with customers using SparkML, both internal and external to Microsoft. Customers have found Spark to be a powerful platform for building scalable ML models. However, they struggle with low-level APIs, for example to index strings, assemble feature vectors and coerce data into a layout expected by machine learning algorithms.