Building a simple but powerful recommendation system is much easier than you think. Approachable for all levels of expertise, this report explains innovations that make machine learning practical for business production settings--and demonstrates how even a small-scale development team can design an effective large-scale recommendation system. Apache Mahout committers Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman walk you through a design that relies on careful simplification. You'll learn how to collect the right data, analyze it with an algorithm from the Mahout library, and then easily deploy the recommender using search technology, such as Apache Solr or Elasticsearch. Powerful and effective, this efficient combination does learning offline and delivers rapid response recommendations in real time. Understand the tradeoffs between simple and complex recommenders Collect user data that tracks user actions--rather than their ratings Predict what a user wants based on behavior by others, using Mahoutfor co-occurrence analysis Use search technology to offer recommendations in real time, complete with item metadata Watch the recommender in action with a music service example Improve your recommender with dithering, multimodal recommendation, and other techniques

Anomaly detection is the detective work of machine learning: finding the unusual, catching the fraud, discovering strange activity in large and complex datasets. But, unlike Sherlock Holmes, you may not know what the puzzle is, much less what "suspects" you're looking for. This O'Reilly report uses practical examples to explain how the underlying concepts of anomaly detection work. From banking security to natural sciences, medicine, and marketing, anomaly detection has many useful applications in this age of big data. And the search for anomalies will intensify once the Internet of Things spawns even more new types of data. The concepts described in this report will help you tackle anomaly detection in your own project. Use probabilistic models to predict what's normal and contrast that to what you observe Set an adaptive threshold to determine which data falls outside of the normal range, using the t-digest algorithm Establish normal fluctuations in complex systems and signals (such as an EKG) with a more adaptive probablistic model Use historical data to discover anomalies in sporadic event streams, such as web traffic Learn how to use deviations in expected behavior to trigger fraud alerts

If you're a business team leader, CIO, business analyst, or developer interested in how Apache Hadoop and Apache HBase-related technologies can address problems involving large-scale data in cost-effective ways, this book is for you. Using real-world stories and situations, authors Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman show Hadoop newcomers and seasoned users alike how NoSQL databases and Hadoop can solve a variety of business and research issues. You'll learn about early decisions and pre-planning that can make the process easier and more productive. If you're already using these technologies, you'll discover ways to gain the full range of benefits possible with Hadoop. While you don't need a deep technical background to get started, this book does provide expert guidance to help managers, architects, and practitioners succeed with their Hadoop projects.Examine a day in the life of big data: India's ambitious Aadhaar project; review tools in the Hadoop ecosystem such as Apache's Spark, Storm, and Drill to learn how they can help you; pick up a collection of technical and strategic tips that have helped others succeed with Hadoop; learn from several prototypical Hadoop use cases, based on how organizations have actually applied the technology. You can explore real-world stories that reveal how MapR customers combine use cases when putting Hadoop and NoSQL to work, including in production.

More and more data-driven companies are looking to adopt stream processing and streaming analytics. With this concise ebook, you ll learn best practices for designing a reliable architecture that supports this emerging big-data paradigm.Authors Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman (Real World Hadoop) help you explore some of the best technologies to handle stream processing and analytics, with a focus on the upstream queuing or message-passing layer. To illustrate the effectiveness of these technologies, this book also includes specific use cases.Ideal for developers and non-technical people alike, this book describes: Key elements in good design for streaming analytics, focusing on the essential characteristics of the messaging layerNew messaging technologies, including Apache Kafka and MapR Streams, with links to sample codeTechnology choices for streaming analytics: Apache Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, Apache Storm, and Apache ApexHow stream-based architectures are helpful to support microservicesSpecific use cases such as fraud detection and geo-distributed data streamsTed Dunning is Chief Applications Architect at MapR Technologies, and active in the open source community. He currently serves as VP for Incubator at the Apache Foundation, as a champion and mentor for a large number of projects, and as committer and PMC member of the Apache ZooKeeper and Drill projects. Ted is on Twitter as @ted_dunning.Ellen Friedman, a committer for the Apache Drill and Apache Mahout projects, is a solutions consultant and well-known speaker and author, currently writing mainly about big data topics. With a PhD in Biochemistry, she has years of experience as a research scientist and has written about a variety of technical topics. Ellen is on Twitter as @Ellen_Friedman."

Many big data-driven companies today are moving to protect certain types of data against intrusion, leaks, or unauthorized eyes. But how do you lock down data while granting access to people who need to see it? In this practical book, authors Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman offer two novel and practical solutions that you can implement right away.Ideal for both technical and non-technical decision makers, group leaders, developers, and data scientists, this book shows you how to: Share original data in a controlled way so that different groups within your organization only see part of the whole. You'll learn how to do this with the new open source SQL query engine Apache Drill.Provide synthetic data that emulates the behavior of sensitive data. This approach enables external advisors to work with you on projects involving data that you can't show them.If you're intrigued by the synthetic data solution, explore the log-synth program that Ted Dunning developed as open source code (available on GitHub), along with how-to instructions and tips for best practice. You'll also get a collection of use cases.Providing lock-down security while safely sharing data is a significant challenge for a growing number of organizations. With this book, you'll discover new options to share data safely without sacrificing security.

There's growing interest in learning how to analyze streaming data in large-scale systems such as web traffic, financial transactions, machine logs, industrial sensors, and many others. But analyzing data streams at scale has been difficult to do well--until now. This practical book delivers a deep introduction to Apache Flink, a highly innovative open source stream processor with a surprising range of capabilities. Authors Ellen Friedman and Kostas Tzoumas show technical and nontechnical readers alike how Flink is engineered to overcome significant tradeoffs that have limited the effectiveness of other approaches to stream processing. You'll also learn how Flink has the ability to handle both stream and batch data processing with one technology. * Learn the consequences of not doing streaming well--in retail and marketing, IoT, telecom, and banking and finance* Explore how to design data architecture to gain the best advantage from stream processing* Get an overview of Flink's capabilities and features, along with examples of how companies use Flink, including in production* Take a technical dive into Flink, and learn how it handles time and stateful computation* Examine how Flink processes both streaming (unbounded) and batch (bounded) data without sacrificing performance

Time series data is of growing importance, especially with the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things. This concise guide shows you effective ways to collect, persist, and access large-scale time series data for analysis. You'll explore the theory behind time series databases and learn practical methods for implementing them. Authors Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman provide a detailed examination of open source tools such as OpenTSDB and new modifications that greatly speed up data ingestion. You'll learn: A variety of time series use cases The advantages of NoSQL databases for large-scale time series data NoSQL table design for high-performance time series databases The benefits and limitations of OpenTSDB How to access data in OpenTSDB using R, Go, and Ruby How time series databases contribute to practical machine learning projects How to handle the added complexity of geo-temporal data For advice on analyzing time series data, check out Practical Machine Learning: A New Look at Anomaly Detection, also from Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman.

Everything You Need to Know to Treat Your Child's Ear Infection

Every parent who has heard the plaintive cry "My ear hurts!" knows that ear infections are among the most troubling childhood ailments. In fact, by the time they turn three years old, 75 percent of children have had at least one ear infection, and nearly 50 percent of these children have suffered more than three ear infections. My Ear Hurts! offers clear explanations of the causes of ear infections and up-to-the-minute discussions of

• traditional medications, including the overuse of antibiotics
• surgical treatments, from insertion of ear tubes to new laser techniques
• alternative treatment options, such as herbal and homeopathic remedies and chiropractic treatment

Also included are

• tips on how to spot common allergies or irritants that couse or exacerbate infections
• advice on how to talk to your child about the infection and its treatment
• guidelines on what to do when your child is under somenone else's supervision
• recommendations for when surgery is -- and is not -- necessary and how to communicate with your child's doctor

With information that is both accessible and authoritative, My Ear Hurts! provides much-needed help and proven solutions to concerned parents and caregivers.