You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to commits@mahout.apache.org by ss...@apache.org on 2014/03/09 09:06:02 UTC
svn commit: r1575672 -
/mahout/site/mahout_cms/trunk/content/general/faq.mdtext
Author: ssc
Date: Sun Mar 9 08:06:01 2014
New Revision: 1575672
URL: http://svn.apache.org/r1575672
Log:
cleaned up FAQ
Modified:
mahout/site/mahout_cms/trunk/content/general/faq.mdtext
Modified: mahout/site/mahout_cms/trunk/content/general/faq.mdtext
URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/mahout/site/mahout_cms/trunk/content/general/faq.mdtext?rev=1575672&r1=1575671&r2=1575672&view=diff
==============================================================================
--- mahout/site/mahout_cms/trunk/content/general/faq.mdtext (original)
+++ mahout/site/mahout_cms/trunk/content/general/faq.mdtext Sun Mar 9 08:06:01 2014
@@ -29,39 +29,39 @@ Title: FAQ
<a name="whatIs"></a>
-### What is Apache Mahout?
+#### What is Apache Mahout?
Apache Mahout is a suite of machine learning libraries designed to be
scalable and robust
<a name="mean"></a>
-### What does the name mean?
+#### What does the name mean?
The name [Mahout](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahout)
- was original chosen for it's association with the [Apache Hadoop|http://hadoop.apache.org]
+ was original chosen for it's association with the [Apache Hadoop](http://hadoop.apache.org)
project. A Mahout is a person who drives an elephant (hint: Hadoop's logo
-is an elephant.) We just wanted a name that complemented Hadoop but we see
+is an elephant). We just wanted a name that complemented Hadoop but we see
our project as a good driver of Hadoop in the sense that we will be using
and testing it. We are not, however, implying that we are controlling
Hadoop's development.
-Prior to coming to the ASF, those of us working on the project plan voted between Howdah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdah â the carriage on top of an elephant) and Mahout.
+Prior to coming to the ASF, those of us working on the project plan voted between [Howdah](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdah) â the carriage on top of an elephant and Mahout.
<a name="historical"></a>
-### Where can I find the origins of the Mahout project?
+#### Where can I find the origins of the Mahout project?
See [http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com](http://web.archive.org/web/20080101233917/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Main_Page)
for old wiki and mailing list archives (all read-only)
-Mahout was started by <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20071228055210/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Main_Page" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">Isabel Drost, Grant Ingersoll and Karl Wettin</a>. It <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093120/http://lucene.apache.org/#22+January+2008+-+Lucene+PMC+Approves+Mahout+Machine+Learning+Project" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">started</a> as part of the <a href="http://lucene.apache.org" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">Lucene</a> project (see the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080102151102/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Incubator_proposal" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">original proposal</a>) and went on to become a top level project in April of 2010.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The original goal was to implement all 10 algorithms from Andrew Ng's paper title "<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2
F%2Fwww.cs.stanford.edu%2Fpeople%2Fang%2Fpapers%2Fnips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf&ei=iaR8TvKYK_DTiALCq7GODg&usg=AFQjCNFaW8ZuT6xuAz61ZaoKaQ7mpmIv2w&sig2=KVaGbhPFI3rKgjtxg4yIjg" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore</a>"</p>
+Mahout was started by <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20071228055210/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Main_Page" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">Isabel Drost, Grant Ingersoll and Karl Wettin</a>. It <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093120/http://lucene.apache.org/#22+January+2008+-+Lucene+PMC+Approves+Mahout+Machine+Learning+Project" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">started</a> as part of the <a href="http://lucene.apache.org" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">Lucene</a> project (see the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080102151102/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Incubator_proposal" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">original proposal</a>) and went on to become a top level project in April of 2010.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The original goal was to implement all 10 algorithms from Andrew Ng's paper "<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fww
w.cs.stanford.edu%2Fpeople%2Fang%2Fpapers%2Fnips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf&ei=iaR8TvKYK_DTiALCq7GODg&usg=AFQjCNFaW8ZuT6xuAz61ZaoKaQ7mpmIv2w&sig2=KVaGbhPFI3rKgjtxg4yIjg" class="external-link" rel="nofollow">Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore</a>"</p>
<a name="pronounce"></a>
-### How is the name pronounced?
+#### How is the name pronounced?
-There are some disagreements about how to pronounce the name. Webster's has it as muh-hout (as in "out" â http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mahout), but the Sanskrit/Hindi origins pronounce it as "muh-hoot". The second pronunciation suggests a nice pun on the Hebrew word ×××ת meaning "essence or truth".
+There are some disagreements about how to pronounce the name. Webster's has it as muh-hout (as in ["out"](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mahout)), but the Sanskrit/Hindi origins pronounce it as "muh-hoot". The second pronunciation suggests a nice pun on the Hebrew word ×××ת meaning "essence or truth".
<a name="logo"></a>
-### Where can I download the Mahout logo?
+#### Where can I download the Mahout logo?
See [MAHOUT-335](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-335)
@@ -69,39 +69,32 @@ See [MAHOUT-335](https://issues.apache.o
<a name="presentations"></a>
### Where can I download Mahout slide presentations?
-* [Books, Tutorials and Talks ](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Books+Tutorials+and+Talks)
- Wiki page containing an overview of all presentations with links to slides
-where available.
+The [Books, Tutorials and Talks](https://mahout.apache.org/general/books-tutorials-and-talks.html)
+ page contains an overview of a wide variety of presentations with links to slides where available.
## Algorithms
<a name="algos"></a>
-### What algorithms are implemented in Mahout?
+#### What algorithms are implemented in Mahout?
We are interested in a wide variety of machine learning algorithms. Many of
-which are already implemented in Mahout. You can find them [here ](http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Algorithms)
-.
+which are already implemented in Mahout. You can find a list [here](https://mahout.apache.org/users/basics/algorithms.html).
<a name="todo"></a>
-### What algorithms are missing from Mahout?
+#### What algorithms are missing from Mahout?
There are many machine learning algorithms that we would like to have in
-Mahout, including some from the paper [http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang/papers/nips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf](http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang/papers/nips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf)
-. If you have an algorithm or an improvement to an algorithm that you would
-like to implement, by all means submit a patch.
+Mahout. If you have an algorithm or an improvement to an algorithm that you would
+like to implement, start a discussion on our [mailing list](https://mahout.apache.org/general/mailing-lists,-irc-and-archives.html).
<a name="hadoop"></a>
-### Do I need Hadoop to use Mahout?
+#### Do I need Hadoop to use Mahout?
-Apart from the possibility of running Hadoop jobs in a single node installation there are
-a couple of modules that require no Hadoop dependencies whatsoever (except maybe for
-vector and matrix serialisation). For recommendation those packages don't have Hadoop as
-part of their namespace. For classification checkout the sgd package. For clustering checkout
-the new kmeans++ stuff.
+There is a number of algorithm implementations that require no Hadoop dependencies whatsoever, consult the [algorithms list](https://mahout.apache.org/users/basics/algorithms.html). In the future, we might provide more algorithm implementations on platforms more suitable for machine learning such as [Apache Spark](http://spark.apache.org)
## Hadoop specific questions
<a href="split"></a>
-### Mahout just won't run in parallel on my dataset. Why?
+#### Mahout just won't run in parallel on my dataset. Why?
If you are running training on a Hadoop cluster keep in mind that the number of mappers started is governed by the size of the input data and the configured split/block size of your cluster. As a rule of thumb,
-anything below 100MB in size won't be split. In addition files compressed e.g. with gzip aren't splitable neither. For a more detailed discussion of the topic see als [IBM InfoSphere Split Size article](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/W265aa64a4f21_43ee_b236_c42a1c875961/page/MapReduce%20-%20Tuning%20the%20number%20of%20map%20tasks)
\ No newline at end of file
+anything below 100MB in size won't be split by default.
\ No newline at end of file