David, Thanks for showing up. We can help much more here than on twitter. A shout out to Ellen for spotting you on twitter and sending you here.
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 6:35 PM, David Kincaid <kincaid.d...@gmail.com>wrote: > I'm very new to Mahout and trying to learn starting with the classification > algorithms since I have an application for it. I've got the book "Mahout in > Action" and am working through chapter 14. This book is excellent, but I > have to say the Mahout documentation has some real shortcomings. You are correct. It does have some real shortcomings. > Especially > for developers wanting to use Mahout from a Java program. Likewise. > Is there any effort underway to improve this so that newbies like me would > have an > easier time figuring out how to use what looks like a great library? > Well, yes and no. I try to make it cleaner where I can, but I have very little time. The recommendation stuff should have decent examples and docs, but that isn't what you are after. One thing that you can do is to point out the problems and even suggest or provide some improvements. Your eyes are still new and thus will see problems more clearly than ours. > One specific example I am trying to find is where the class > org.apache.mahout.math.RandomAccessSparseVector is? It is in the Mahout math package. This is a separate package in order to simplify using just that from other projects. Use mvn install to get the mahout math package installed into your local maven repository. If you use IntelliJ, I recommend just giving it the top level maven pom as the project file and it will find classes like this across module boundaries very nicely. There may be similar capabilities in Eclipse as well. > It is used quite a bit > in this book, yet I can't seem to find the class anywhere. The javadocs for > 0.6 don't show that class (or several others that are referenced in the > book). This is a bit unfortunate, but the math javadocs are separate: http://search-lucene.com/jd/mahout/math/overview-tree.html and http://search-lucene.com/jd/mahout/math/org/apache/mahout/math/RandomAccessSparseVector.html may help a bit. > Can you help me understand where those classes are of if they have > been replaced with others already please point me at the replacements. > Let us know if this helps or if there is more to say.
