Google opened to the public their recently launched Prediction API
This API allows you to create a Classifier, that learns from a dataset of examples. Your example data can be numeric or plain text, and it results in hundreds of categories. It has built-in several machine learning algorithms, and it chooses automatically one for your needs.
As Travis Green explains it:
Now your apps can get smarter with as little as a single line of code. They can learn to continually adapt to changing conditions and to integrate new information. This week at Google I/O, we’re making the Google Prediction API generally available, meaning you can create apps with these capabilities for yourself. Additionally, we’re introducing several significant new features, including:
- The ability to stream data and tune your predictive models
- A forthcoming gallery of user-developed, pre-built models to add smarts even faster
So not only you can create your own Classifier, but you can just use one ‘Ready to use’, made by a Third Party. I’m pretty sure there are millions of applications for which it will be great to reuse an already trained program.
Just one caveat, one of the major critics of some algorithms in Machine Learning is that the classification has no explanation. So getting somebody else’s Classificator feels like trusting somebody else’s criteria. No problem having a classifier to predict what film I will like, but at the pace technology is evolving and invading our everyday life, soon we will be using it for bigger decision makings. So let’s improve those algorithms to get rid of all biases!
