Machine learning is all the rage right now. It claims to revolutionize the way computers will work. Top tech companies are hiring washed-up statisticians for millions of dollars specifically to build the machine learning programs. Universities offer machine learning classes, machine learning majors, and machine learning departments. Governments and militaries are crafting labyrinth plans to adjust to the threat of machine learning and use the new technology to gain tactical advantages.

Is it possible to distinguish one class of samples from another, based on some set of measurements? Research investigating this and related medical questions have spurred innovation in medicine and the application of statistical methods and machine learning for decades. In this post, we'll address how to answer these questions using highly available, scalable, and easy-to-use cloud computing services that are included in Amazon Web Services (AWS). We'll start by guiding you through using Amazon Machine Learning to classify medical tumor samples as benign or malignant. Then, we'll explore other machine learning services and how they could be used to investigate medical questions.

With Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML), you can build and train predictive models and host your applications in a scalable cloud solution. In this tutorial, we show you how to use the Amazon ML console to create a datasource, build a machine learning (ML) model, and use the model to generate predictions that you can use in your applications. Our sample exercise shows how to identify potential customers for a targeted marketing campaign, but you can apply the same principles to create and use a variety of ML models. To complete the sample exercise, you will use publicly available banking and marketing datasets from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) Machine Learning Repository. These datasets contain general information about customers, and information about how they responded to previous marketing contacts.

Something is wrong in the way ML is being taught to developers. Most ML teachers like to explain how different learning algorithms work and spend tons of time on that. For a beginner who wants to start using ML, being able to choose an algorithm and set parameters looks like the #1 barrier to entry, and knowing how the different techniques work seems to be a key requirement to remove that barrier. Many practitioners argue however that you only need one technique to get started: random forests. Other techniques may sometimes outperform them, but in general, random forests are the most likely to perform best on a variety of problems (see Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?), which makes them more than enough for a developer just getting started with ML.

Air travel can be stressful due to the many factors that are simply out of airline passengers' control. As passengers, we want to minimize this stress as much as we can. We can do this by using past data to make predictions about how likely a flight will be delayed based on the time of day or the airline carrier. In this post, we generate a predictive model for flight delays that can be used to help us pick the flight least likely to add to our travel stress. To accomplish this, we will use Apache Spark running on Amazon EMR for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) the data, Amazon Redshift for analysis, and Amazon Machine Learning for creating predictive models.

With Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML), you can build and train predictive models and host your applications in a scalable cloud solution. In this project, you will use the visualization tools and wizards of Amazon ML to guide you through the process of creating a new machine learning (ML) model without having to learn complex ML algorithms and technology. To complete this project, you will download freely-available sample customer data and upload the data to an Amazon S3 bucket to create a datasource. You will then create an ML model from this datasource, from which you can then evaluate and adjust the ML model's performance, and then use it to generate predictions.