Apache Mahout is a project of the Apache Software Foundation to produce free implementations of distributed or otherwise scalable machine learning algorithms focused primarily in the areas of collaborative filtering, clustering and classification. Many of the implementations use the Apache Hadoop platform. Mahout also provides Java libraries for common maths operations (focused on linear algebra and statistics) and primitive Java collections. Mahout is a work in progress; the number of implemented algorithms has grown quickly, but various algorithms are still missing.
While Mahout's core algorithms for clustering, classification and batch based collaborative filtering are implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm, it does not restrict contributions to Hadoop-based implementations. Contributions that run on a single node or on a non-Hadoop cluster are also welcomed. For example, the 'Taste' collaborative-filtering recommender component of Mahout was originally a separate project and can run stand-alone without Hadoop.
Starting with the release 0.10.0, the project shifts its focus to building backend-independent programming environment, code named "Samsara". The environment consists of an algebraic backend-independent optimizer and an algebraic Scala DSL unifying in-memory and distributed algebraic operators. At the time of this writing supported algebraic platforms are Apache Spark and H2O, and Apache Flink. Support for MapReduce algorithms is being gradually phased out.
References
Introduction to Apache Mahout - Apache Mahout introduction in 3 minutes. http://www.youtube.com/user/BTI360/featured Take a ride with BTI360's Orangeman to discover Apache Mahout in this short animation that is sure to...
External links
- Official website
- Giraph - a Graph processing infrastructure that runs on Hadoop (see Pregel).
- Pregel - Google's internal graph processing platform, released details in ACM paper.
- Mahout Mailing List Archives
Demonstrations
- A Spring based Java demo application that demonstrates a simple recommender using Apache Mahout
- Demo of travel recommendations using anonymous user-based recommender of Mahout
