Predictive Analytics With Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

(On vacation this week)

Over the Christmas holiday, I had some time to look at some of the books that have been sitting on my bookshelf.  One of these was Predictive Analytics With Microsoft Machine Learning by Barga, Fontama, and Tok. 

This book is a great introduction to both analytics and Azure ML.  I really appreciated how the authors started off with a couple of basic experiments to get your feet wet, then moved over to some theory about different ML techniques, and then finished out the rest of the book with some hand-on labs.

I worked through all of the labs (except 1) in about 6 hours.  The labs follow a very nice step-by-step pattern with plenty of screen shots.  My only quibble with the book is that the most interesting lab was Building a Chun Model that relied on data from a third party.  When I went to the 3rd party’s website to download the data, the data had broken links and 404s.  I went to the book’s site at APress and its did not have the data either.  That was kinda frustrating and something that the authors should have considered.

In any event, if you have some time, working through Predictive Analytics With Microsoft Azure Machine Learning is well worth the time and is quite fun.