Mahout is an open source framework that can run common machine learning algorithms on massive datasets. To achieve that scalability, most of the code is written as parallelizable jobs on top of Hadoop. It comes with algorithms to perform a lot of common tasks, like clustering and classifying objects into groups, recommending items based on other users’ behaviors, and spotting attributes that occur together a lot. In practical terms, the framework makes it easy to use analysis techniques to implement features such as Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought” recommendation engine on your own site.
It’s a heavily used project with an active community of developers and users, and it’s well worth trying if you have any significant number of transaction or similar data that you’d like to get more value out of.
