I think there is a big craze with regard to ML. Most people just draw a black box call it ML/Brain/"hire data scientist" without realizing that for most nontrivial problems its not going to work like magic. Some of the things that I see people underestimating is; a) how hard it is to make the magic black box b) amount of data you need c) how clean the data needs to be d) at times, you need lots of human annotated data -- cost and time to collect it e) how much it's a art than a science. Moreover, people don't have a good understating of the technical challenges and cost when you need to scale to n (features) * m (customers) * p (products). Maybe Azure solves some of these challenges but quickly looking at the pricing -- it seems like its a bit too costly.
Of course Azure is a __much__ more complex service, but I am currently working in a <i>somehow</i> similar project:<p><a href="https://www.datapal.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.datapal.io</a><p>The main goal of this project is to make it easy for people without knowledge in predictive analytics to use their stored data in order to make predictions.<p>__It is still a very early prototype__, therefore the "predictive power" is not great yet, and all kind of bugs are expected.<p>I have a lot of ideas on how to improve the service and your feedback would be really appreciated in order to prioritize the next steps!<p>Thanks!
I think saw a couple of differentiators from Google's prediction engine. Would someone happen to have a more comprehensive view of how this is different from Google Prediction API?
If any YC startups are interested in checking out Azure, note that Microsoft grants $60k in usage credits (as well as architecture and engineering support). Shoot me a mail at felix.rieseberg@microsoft.com and I'll help you out!
Some real world examples here.<p><a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2014/07/14/how-azure-ml-partners-are-innovating-for-their-customers.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2014/07/1...</a><p>There's also the Azure Machine learning university program with videos etc., but looks like it's for partners only, perhaps will be available to all once it's out of preview.<p><a href="https://readytogo.microsoft.com/global/_layouts/RTG/CampaignViewer.aspx?CampaignUrl=https://readytogo.microsoft.com/global/campaign/pages/machine%20learning%20university%20(global).aspx&WT.mc_id=Blog_MachLearn_General_DI" rel="nofollow">https://readytogo.microsoft.com/global/_layouts/RTG/Campaign...</a>