Recently SVM implementation was added into Mahout & I am planning to use SVM. Anyone tried it yet?

Question

Any new developments happening around SVM (Support Vector Machines) in Mahout (Machine Learning With Hadoop) using Hadoop? Recently SVM implementation was added into Mahout. and I am planning to use SVM. Anyone tried it yet? Very little information is available on internet.

Any help/guidance is appreciated.

Answer 1

No, there is no SVM implementation in Mahout.

There are three Jira issues about it: Mahout-14 and Mahout-334 have been closed as won't fix. Mahout-232 was assigned later because some code was contributed early (2009) but it did not work so it was not incorporated into Mahout. Since then Mahout has changed, so porting the code would be difficult, and if you look at the issue there is some disagreement about whether it approaches the problem in the best way.

There is some code for a cascadeSVM implementation but the training part - the hard part - was never published.

There is a parallel SVM implementation that runs on MPI rather than Hadoop.

This San Francisco Meetup abstract has some discussion of current state of the art and issues for parallel SVM.