How NoSQL Has Fundamentally Changed Machine Learning

Summary: In just the six or seven short years since the first commercial implementation of a Hadoop NoSQL database Machine Learning has come to mean so much more than it did before. The question often comes up from folks starting to explore data science, just what is Machine Learning? When I started out it was easy to explain. Machine Learning (ML) was the category of mathematical algorithms like regression, clustering, decision trees, and neural nets used to extract signals from data, aka predictive models. Then came NoSQL and all that changed.