Microsoft Big Data Solutions

Big Data Analytics

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Exploring Data Mining and Predictive Analytics
• Using the Mahout Machine Learning Library
• Building a Recommendation Engine on Hadoop

Up to this point, the focus has been on building a foundation that enables you to capture and store large volumes of disparate data. When this data is collected, as you have seen in previous chapters, it can be easily summarized and aggregated using tools built in to the Hadoop ecosystem.

Although this is noteworthy, it alone hardly justifies the time or investment required to implement a big data solution in your organization. The real value for businesses in bringing this data together is that it can be mined for hidden patterns, correlations, and other interesting information that can facilitate better business decision making.

This chapter covers how you can use HDInsight and Hadoop as a big data analytics platform by taking advantage of the Mahout machine learning library to deliver predictive analytics, such as implementing a recommendation engine, and to perform more common data mining in the form of clustering and classification.

Data Science, Data Mining, and Predictive Analytics

Included in just about every big data discussion, the art of data science is one that is built on multiple disciplines. Various skills involving mathematics, statistics, and computer science are combined to ...