2015/11/26
 
26 Nov, 2015 | 3 min read

Have You Checked Out the WSO2 Machine Learner Yet?

  • Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
  • Marketing Officer - WSO2

WSO2 Machine Learner is the latest addition to the WSO2 product stack. Or, to be precise, one of the latest additions: Machine Learner only held the crown for a few weeks before WSO2 Data Analytics Server become the new kid on the block.

Nevertheless, Machine Learner is something we’re particularly proud of. As you no doubt guessed, it’s a product meant for predictive business analytics: by building models and running data through them, it allows one to quite literally peek into possible futures.

Why is this important? Well, machine learning is rapidly becoming the new frontier for businesses. We’ve gone from educated guesses to dedicated analytics: now we’re trying to predict the future.

“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I'm joking, but who would've guessed that computer engineers would've been the sexy job of the 1990s?” - Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

Hal Varian expects statisticians to be the next sexy job because of the sheer amounts of data and intelligence that companies need to chew through these days.  At WSO2, we expect machine learning to be an integral part of what makes that job sexy. And useful.

Done right, machine learning can easily replace a small army of statisticians - especially when it comes to enterprise big data. The world isn’t (yet) at the level where we can recreate a Minority Report for businesses, but there’s a lot of work that’s gone into this space. If you don’t know the field, you should: we’d recommend this short and beautifully designed Visual Introduction to Machine Learning, courtesy of R2D3.

If you know the field, you can skip the above and go directly to what Nirmal Fernando has to say. Nirmal leads the team working on the project, and his blogpost on ML gives a quick, concise breakdown of what WSO2 Machine Learner is capable of. Part of the challenge of predictive analytics is presenting the data intelligently, something we’ve paid careful attention to with WSO2 ML.

After that, you should probably check out what Srinath Perera, our Vice President of Research, has to say: he’s written a post called “WSO2 Machine Learner: Why Would You Care?” on his personal blog. This talks about how ML is built, and the uses you can put it to.

As you can see, ML completes our analytics offerings - we now offer batch, real-time, interactive and predictive analytics, and all of these components tie into each other beautifully for creating end-to-end analytics solutions for your business.

Of course, we have plans for making Machine Learner more powerful: we plan to add neural networks, algorithmic recommendation, anomaly detection, and more - as the product evolves, we’ll keep pushing out updates.

You can jump in and check this all out for yourself, of course! Machine Learner is free and open source. The Getting Started guide in our documentation will tell you everything you need to know to get a Machine Learner instance off the ground. Supun Setunga’s cooked up a detailed post on how you can set up that very first predictive model.

Download Machine Learner here, and you’re good to go. Set up your models right and you can peek into the future without actually having to go at 88 miles an hour in an old DeLorean. What’s not to like?

PS: If you’d like to call for support, or suggest features, don’t hesitate to contact us. We welcome bug reports, too!

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