Machine learning is about discovering hidden insights or patterns from the available data. Machine learning algorithms can be divided in two categories: supervised learning and unsupervised learning. There are many real-world applications of machine learning in diverse domains, such as information retrieval, business, and health care.

Apache Mahout is a scalable machine learning library that runs on top of the Hadoop framework. In v0.10, Apache Mahout is shifting toward Apache Spark and H20 to address performance and usability issues that occur due to the MapReduce programming paradigm.

In the upcoming chapters, we will dive deep into different machine learning techniques.