Meh. The more I do machine learning in industry the more I realize how little the ML part matters compares to everything else. A typical project I've seen takes 3-6 months and contains thousands lines of code, but the machine learning part will take a week or two and be 100 lines of code. What Amazon ML is doing would probably take an hour and 30 lines of R code you can easily find online.<p>And here's the not-too-hidden secret: the ML part is the fun part. It's a big reason we spend months creating banking.csv. Josh Willis did a very funny presentation at MLconf partly about this. It's like waiting in line at a theme park for an hour, and then paying someone to cut in line at the last minute and record the ride for you.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gwf5zsg4vI&feature=youtu.be&t=657" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gwf5zsg4vI&feature=youtu.be...</a>
Is it just Amazon's catching up with Azure ML launched last year? (And cutting prices by 80%)<p><i>Azure ML also supports R and Python custom code, which can be dropped directly into your workspace. </i><p>And this was even before Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics. Amazon ML seems to be less flexible in regards to importing your own models:<p><i>Q: Can I export my models out of Amazon Machine Learning?<p>No.<p>Q: Can I import existing models into Amazon Machine Learning?<p>No.</i><p><a href="http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/16/microsoft-azure-machine-learning-combines-power-of-comprehensive-machine-learning-with-benefits-of-cloud/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/16/microsoft-azure-m...</a><p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/faqs/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/faqs/</a><p><a href="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/" rel="nofollow">http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/</a>
Yeah sure, why not make your business process depend on a closed proprietary cloud-based product?<p>(in all fairness Amazon are better than many when it comes to unexpectedly withdrawing products)
So the pricing is $100 per million data points, at minimum. That doesn't seem like it scales well for big data at all.<p>However, that's 5x cheaper than what BigML is offering (<a href="https://bigml.com/pricing/credits" rel="nofollow">https://bigml.com/pricing/credits</a>) for its ad hoc service, so I might be wrong.
Did they basically just put a wrapper around VW[1] ?<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit</a>
I am really amazed at the kind of things Amazon turns into a service. And this ML service is just wow'ing. I have fiddled with basic SVM's before, but this takes away the part of writing code and makes it sort of a end user product(you are still expected to know basics about ML).
On the other hand, I also don't think this will take off very well. Maybe a few companies/startups who have cash in their pocket will use it/try it out, but the audience is really limited beyond that in my opinion.
At first glance, this looks to go somewhat beyond Google's Prediction API, which (at least from my experience) is pretty limited in its usefulness.<p>Its nice to see tools for analyzing your data as well as multi-class classification, and some tune-able parameters but this doesn't seem to bring anything 'new' to the game.<p>All the hard parts, feature selection, noise, unlabeled data, etc are still up to the end user, which makes me wonder how many people will try this out and get poor results.<p>It would be nice to get an idea of what sort of model they are using on the backend or even having a choice of models.
Did anyone actually give it a try? I only get this error with any dataset (even a humble Iris): Amazon ML cannot create an ML model: 1 validation error detected: Value null at 'predictiveModelType' failed to satisfy constraint: Member must not be null
I like the "Introduction to Machine Learning" which sort of briefly outlines the basics of machine learning for people who don't know about it.
I predict we will see more cloud based machine learning services. Since machine learning is hard to learn and write for the average person, providing the services will greatly help them.<p>It would be good if there were an open source tool like Libreoffice that does Machine Learning in their spreadsheet app. It would be a good feature to add, and then the competitors would have to add it to their software as well.
Some have already taken this kinda thing a few steps further:<p><a href="http://www.automaticstatistician.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.automaticstatistician.com/</a>