Mahout is an effort to implement well-known machine learning and data mining algorithms using the Hadoop MapReduce framework. Users can use Mahout algorithm implementations in their data processing applications without going through the complexity of implementing these algorithms using Hadoop MapReduce from scratch.
This recipe explains how to get started with Mahout.
In order to install Mahout, we recommend you use one of the freely available commercial Hadoop distributions as described in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Hadoop v2. Another alternative is to use Apache Bigtop to install Mahout. Refer to the Bigtop-related recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Hadoop v2 for steps on installing Mahout using the Apache Bigtop distribution.