Microsoft To Launch Machine Learning Service

angry tapir (1463043) writes Microsoft will soon offer a service aimed at making machine-learning technology more widely usable. "We want to bring machine learning to many more people," Eron Kelly, Microsoft corporate vice president and director SQL Server marketing, said of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, due to be launched in beta form in July. "The line of business owners and the marketing teams really want to use data to get ahead, but data volumes are getting so large that it is difficult for businesses to sift through it all," Kelly said. The service will have "...an interface called the Machine Learning Studio. The palette includes visual icons for some of the most commonly used machine-learning algorithms, allowing the user to drag and drop them into a visually depicted workflow." Algorithms themselves are implemented in R, which the user of the service can use directly as well.

Comments

You want machine learning? You want IBM's Watson.

[mmell]

That machine wasn't merely a decision engine or a huge database - it was a learning system which was given a few months to learn all it could on a broad variety of subjects by crawling the internet. It wasn't programmed with rules to pair an answer with the correct question; it was a system which "learned" how to associate concepts. It was programmed to permit it to weigh its questions against how well they correlated to the answers - to determine a confidence level - but it wasn't specifically programmed to devise questions associated with answers. That's why the next publicly stated idea for the system was in medical diagnostics. It's another area where the ability to relate multiple seemingly disparate items of information with a non-static data store seemed to be of value.

Giving the right programming, it might even hold a conversation better than a 13 year old Ukrainian boy.

Re:Sky.NET

[sribe]

Why did it have to be Microsoft?

Well, at least it will keep crashing, and maybe humanity will figure out a way to defeat it during one of the reboots.

Give WEKA a try

[AlienSexist]

WEKA is Open Source, has an adequate GUI, many different kinds of algorithms available, and a "knowledge flow" visual designer for you to chain it all together. I've used it in a few personal and professional projects to find things like which variables most strongly influence an outcome, decision trees, derived formulas and expressions that accurately predict outputs from inputs, and various kinds of data visualizations for clustering data samples. Code is in Java so I presume you could embed it within a system to automatically perform analysis and swap algorithms on the fly. Best of all, since this is software under your control, and not a Corporate-offered service, your valuable data never leaves your control.

I think WEKA already did a lot to make these kinds of data analysis accessible as Microsoft is aiming to do. No matter who provides it to you, there is something totally awesome about being able to click a few buttons and get some interesting results to munch on.

Re:Give WEKA a try

[lorinc]

I have only one problem with fancy GUI that allow you to train a predicting model in 2 clicks: how confident can you be in your model, since all the parameters are masked and you have no knowledge about them? I still think it is dangerous to rely on a tool you don't understand and you can't control up to a satisfactory level, especially when it is to be used in prediction - something we expect to be highly reliable in many aspects due to old development of science like balistics.

I've written a ML library myself (also in Java, more lightweight than weka, but with no gui - although it comes with standalone binaries for some basic setups) and I can tell you there is no good default tunning that works well for every kind of situation. ML is seriously a young science that gets rapidly tricky even on very common problems, which is very different than field for which we have very accurate solvers that work most of the time (again balistics is probably a good example, at least because it is taught in school and sets the prototype of what we name science). I fear hidding the youth (and thus the imperfection) is only going to cause damage through misconception and false interpretation.

Re:Give WEKA a try

[LetterRip]

Having used Weka, sklearn, vowpal wabbit, Orange, and lots of others - I'd say that Weka is my least favorite, it is slow and has crappy memory management. I do use it occassionaly for feature ranking and reduction, but rarely for the actual machine learning.

Re:Give WEKA a try

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually worked on this project and I can say from using it and WEKA that this is much, much more user friendly.

Re:Give WEKA a try

[Jon Peterson]

You don't trust anything you haven't built???

How do you know your HDD firmware isn't corrupting data? Build it yourself??

Re:Give WEKA a try

[radtea]

I have only one problem with fancy GUI that allow you to train a predicting model in 2 clicks: how confident can you be in your model, since all the parameters are masked and you have no knowledge about them

This. Expecting people with no knowledge of statistics, programming, or machine learning algorithms to develop appropriate models and interpret them correctly is unrealistic.

I've worked on applications that attempted to bring machine learning to the desktop for specific tasks, and it failed because naive users were simply not able to bring the required knowledge and nuance to the table. It made experts better (I still use the program myself now and then) but there was a threshold below which it was useless.

Without getting your hands on the data and understanding something about the internals of the problem you can't build learning systems that will be plausibly generalizable. Overtraining (and undervalidation) is still a rampant problem in ML applications, and this kind of technology will just make it worse.

Learning algorithms, especially at the level they are implemented in R, are not black boxes. They need to be understood and applied carefully and appropriately.

Watch out for embrace and extend

[Anonymous Coward]

The R programming language is fully GNU. And now microsoft wants it. Expect them to take it, then try to claim it, and then when they can't, try to make their own, and drag everyone away from it (bringing a world of hurt to all involved).

Re:Watch out for embrace and extend

[shutdown -p now]

Microsoft has been doing Python for over 3 years now. A lot of people "expected them to take it, then try to claim it, and then when they can't, try to make their own, and drag everyone away from it", but it hasn't materialized yet.

Have you considered that your preconceived notions of Microsoft are a decade old, and it's might be a different company run by different people by now? Or that there's no business purpose in anything beyond "embrace", if you can just use it as a selling point to sell a product to people who don't care about all-MS top-to-bottom stack, as has been increasingly common in the last ten years?

Re:Sky.NET

[Cryacin]

(Arnie) Reboot this!

Re:Sky.NET

[AHuxley]

It only crashes for the end user, the parts that track the user for advertizing and the US gov have a perfect operational record.

Re:Sky.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least it will keep crashing, and maybe humanity will figure out a way to defeat it during one of the reboots.

Sadly, they appear to be embracing R (http://www.r-project.org/) as the backend, so it will be stable ate least until the "extend" phase.

When have they ever implemented this well?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, they have a lot of products and very few, if any, are examples of good machine learning.

Re:When have they ever implemented this well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clippy.

Re:When have they ever implemented this well?

[hoggoth]

Microsoft has finally gone too far:

https://flic.kr/p/nJ4xag

Re:You want machine learning? You want IBM's Watso

[skovnymfe]

Wouldn't you have to ask it questions in the form of an answer? But I suppose that's what diagnosticians do now I think about it.

Six patients, one of which presents with a big hole in the head.

What is russian roulette?

Re: You want machine learning? You want IBM's Wat

[TapeCutter]

AFAIK, IBM has only just started leasing instances of watson to "development partners" earlier this year. A single instance of Watson can now run on a bar-fridge server, I doubt they come cheap and I doubt IBM will simply allow people to access/deploy the technology without IBM's "help". They have a clear market advantage and a keen interest from the big end of town, they are not going to throw that away to compete with a MS gimmick.

Journalists

[louic]

Let's hope journalists will not be told about this tool. I'm getting tired of repeating that correlation does not imply causation.

Microsoft Services

[rossdee]

They advertise that the Microsoft Cloud gives the Lotus F1 Team the winning edge

Lotus haven't done much winning this season, they are the eighth team out of 11 in the constructors championship

Re:Microsoft Services

[Richard_at_work]

Microsoft also partner with McLaren F1 to produce the engine ECU :)

Triple E

[fph il quozientatore]

So, R is being Embraced. I wander what's coming next...

No one will know

[Viol8]

Nobody watches F1 anymore anyway. Its just an out of touch travelling fashion show with cars these days with utterly boring racing and overpaid drivers who've all had a personality bypass. Eventually it'll disappear up its own exhaust pipe with barely a squeak of tyres and nobody will even notice.

Re:Sky.NET

[Jon Peterson]

Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc. etc.

Actually, Azure is great, and the addition of high level services like this is the right direction. Just spinning up VMs isn't nearly as useful as a service layer.

The algorithms aren't an especially hard part of machine learning, dealing with the data is. Anything that would save me the hassle of trying to fit things in RAM would be great...

You do know what's coming, right?

[ArcadeMan]

We keep getting news about automated weapons, cheaper and cheaper drones, and now machine learning.

Everyone saw the Terminator movies, right?

Re:Sky.NET

[LifesABeach]

I guess we will see R# in the next version of Visual Studio?

Re:Leave Windows OS as first step forward

[FearTheDonut]

I believe defragging is completely automated at this point (since Windows 7) - no button press needed (but you can do it, if you want too).

The idea is like RapidMiner

[xgdgsc]

Where you can draw a visual workflow.

Re:Sky.NET

[RevWaldo]

It looks like you'd like to kill all humans.

[ ] Launch thermonuclear weapons at all the major population centers.

[ ] Don't help, and let me target the weapons directly.

[ ] Don't show this tip again.

.