Weka is a comprehensive software that lets you to preprocess the big data, apply different machine learning algorithms on big data and compare various outputs. This software makes it easy to work with big data and train a machine using machine learning algorithms. This tutorial will guide you in the use of WEKA for achieving all the above requirements.

Audience

This tutorial suits well the needs of machine learning enthusiasts who are keen to learn Weka. It caters the learning needs of both the beginners and experts in machine learning.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is written for readers who are assumed to have a basic knowledge in data mining and machine learning algorithms.

If you are new to these topics, we suggest you pick up tutorials on these before you start your learning with Weka.

The foundation of any Machine Learning application is data – not just a little data but a huge data which is termed as Big Data in the current terminology.

To train the machine to analyze big data, you need to have several considerations on the data −

• The data must be clean.
• It should not contain null values.

Besides, not all the columns in the data table would be useful for the type of analytics that you are trying to achieve. The irrelevant data columns or ‘features’ as termed in Machine Learning terminology, must be removed before the data is fed into a machine learning algorithm.

In short, your big data needs lots of preprocessing before it can be used for Machine Learning. Once the data is ready, you would apply various Machine Learning algorithms such as classification, regression, clustering and so on to solve the problem at your end.

The type of algorithms that you apply is based largely on your domain knowledge. Even within the same type, for example classification, there are several algorithms available. You may like to test the different algorithms under the same class to build an efficient machine learning model. While doing so, you would prefer visualization of the processed data and thus you also require visualization tools.

In the upcoming chapters, you will learn about Weka, a software that accomplishes all the above with ease and lets you work with big data comfortably.