Take the 2-minute tour ×

I need to run various machine learning techniques on a big dataset (10-100 billions records) The problems are mostly around text mining/information extraction and include various kernel techniques but are not restricted to them (we use some bayesian methods, bootstrapping, gradient boosting, regression trees -- many different problems and ways to solve them)

What would be the best implementation? I'm experienced in ML but do not have much experience how to do it for huge datasets Is there any extendable and customizable Machine Learning libraries utilizing MapReduce infrastructure Strong preference to c++, but Java and python are ok Amazon Azure or own datacenter (we can afford it)?

share|improve this question

closed as not constructive by Bo Persson, John Dibling, kapa, M42, gimpf Oct 10 '12 at 11:21


8 Answers 8

up vote 16 down vote accepted

Unless the classification state space you are attempting to learn is extremely large, I would expect that there is significant redundancy in a text-mining-focused dataset with 10-100 billion records or training samples. As a rough guess, I would doubt that one would need much more than a 1-2% random sample subset to learn reliable classifiers that would hold up well under cross-validation testing.

A quick literature search came up with the following relevant papers. The Tsang paper claims O(n) time complexity for n training samples, and there is software related to it available as the LibCVM toolkit. The Wolfe paper describes a distributed EM approach based on MapReduce.

Lastly, there was a Large-Scale Machine Learning workshop at the NIPS 2009 conference that looks to have had lots of interesting and relevant presentations.


Ivor W. Tsang, James T. Kwok, Pak-Ming Cheung (2005). "Core Vector Machines: Fast SVM Training on Very Large Data Sets", Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol 6, pp 363–392.

J Wolfe, A Haghighi, D Klein (2008). "Fully Distributed EM for Very Large Datasets", Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp 1184-1191.

Olivier Camp, Joaquim B. L. Filipe, Slimane Hammoudi and Mario Piattini (2005). "Mining Very Large Datasets with Support Vector Machine Algorithms ", Enterprise Information Systems V, Springer Netherlands, pp 177-184.

share|improve this answer

Apache Mahout is what you are looking for.

share|improve this answer
Does it works on Windows? –  mrgloom Apr 29 '13 at 7:36

Im not aware of any ML library that uses map/reduce. Maybe you have the capability to use an ML library and a Map/Reduce library together? You might want to look into Hadoop's Map/Reduce: http://hadoop.apache.org/mapreduce/

you would have to implement the reduce and the map methods. The fact that you use so many techniques might complicate this.

you can run it on your own cluster or if you are doing research maybe you could look into BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/).

On the other hand, maybe you can reduce your data-set. I have no idea what you are training on, but there must be some redundancy in 10 billion records...

share|improve this answer
Mahout is a machine learning library that uses hadoop for processing –  David Parks Apr 14 at 4:22

Take a look at http://hunch.net/?p=1068 for info on Vowpal Wabbit; it's a stochastic gradient descent library for large-scale applications.

share|improve this answer

I don't know of any ML libraries that can support 10 to 100 billion records, that's a bit of an extreme so I wouldn't expect to find anything off the shelf. What I would recommend is that you take a look at NetFlix prize winners: http://www.netflixprize.com//community/viewtopic.php?id=1537

The NetFlix prize had over 100 million entries, so while it's not quite as big as your data set you may still find their solutions to be applicable. What the BelKor team did was to combine multiple algorithms (something similar to ensemble learning) and weight the "prediction" or output of each algorithm.

share|improve this answer
Mahout/hadoop supports these scales –  David Parks Apr 14 at 4:21

A friend of mine has worked on a similar project. He used perl for text mining and matlab for techniques as bayesian methods, latent semantic analysis and gaussian mixture...

share|improve this answer
Using only one system doesn't really count as large scale, and it's not what the OP asked for either. –  Staffan Jul 9 '10 at 0:40

See this list of large-scale machine learning resources (courses, papers etc): http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-introductory-resources-for-learning-about-large-scale-machine-learning

share|improve this answer
