From the website:
Apache Mahout’s goal is to build scalable machine learning libraries. With scalable we mean:
Scalable to reasonably large data sets. Our core algorithms for clustering, classfication and batch based collaborative filtering are implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm. However we do not restrict contributions to Hadoop based implementations: Contributions that run on a single node or on a non-Hadoop cluster are welcome as well. The core libraries are highly optimized to allow for good performance also for non-distributed algorithms.
Current capabilities include:
- Collaborative Filtering
- User and Item based recommenders
- K-Means, Fuzzy K-Means clustering
- Mean Shift clustering
- Dirichlet process clustering
- Latent Dirichlet Allocation
- Singular value decomposition
- Parallel Frequent Pattern mining
- Complementary Naive Bayes classifier
- Random forest decision tree based classifier
- High performance java collections (previously colt collections)
A topic maps class will only have enough time to show some examples of using Mahout. Perhaps an informal group?