Hands On Mahout - Mammoth Scale Machine Learning

Attendee prerequisites for this tutorial are listed below.

Mahout is an open source machine learning library from Apache. At the present stage of development, it is evolving with a focus on collaborative filtering/recommendation engines, clustering, and classification.

There is no user interface, or a pre-packaged distributable server or installer. It is, at best, a framework of tools intend to be used and adapted by developers. The algorithms in this “suite” can be used in applications ranging from recommendation engines for movie websites to designing early warning systems in credit risk engines supporting the cards industry out there.

This tutorial aims at helping you set up Mahout to run on a Hadoop setup. The instructor will walk you through the basic idea behind each of the algorithms. Having done that, we’ll take a look at how it can be run on some of the large-sized datasets and how it can be used to solve real world problems.

If your site or smartphone app or viral facebook app collects data which you really want to use a lot more productively, this session is for you!

PREREQUISITES

Instructions for setting up Mahout

First, subscribe to mahout-oscon googlegroup for updates, announcements and for discussing issues with setting up mahout for the tutorial.

Platforms supported by Mahout

• Linux
• Mac
  (its possible to setup Mahout on Cygwin on Windows, but its an unsupported platform for both Hadoop and Mahout)

System Requirements

• Java 1.6.x or greater.
• Maven 2.2.x to build the source code.
• Subversion 1.6 or higher

On Mac

• Install mac-ports http://www.macports.org/
• Install maven, subversion using macports . The commands are given below
  • sudo port install subversion
  • sudo port install maven
• Install Java for MacOSX from the apple website or using the MacUpdate mechanism

On Linux

• On debian/ubuntu systems, install subversion, jdk and maven using the aptitude repo tool (apt-get install <>)
• On fedora systems, install subversion, jdk and maven from yum repo tool (yum install <>)
• Ensure the versions numbers are as given above

Setting up instructions

• Use Subversion to check out the code:
svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/mahout/trunk mahout mahout
• $ cd mahout
• Use maven to compile the library
$ mvn install -DskipTests=true

If everything went fine, you will have a compiled library of mahout on your laptop. To test if everything has succeeded, run the following command to test your setup.

• $ bin/mahout kmeans—help

If you face trouble compiling the library, shoot an email to mahout-oscon googlegroup. We will try to help you setup the library prior to coming for the tutorial.

QUESTIONS for the speaker?: Use the “Leave a Comment or Question” section at the bottom to address them.