15 Machine Learning Tools to Know

Machine learning tools let users build and train new machine learning models and create algorithms. With machine learning, computers have the ability to not only automate data analysis, but do it in such a way that it can “learn” through experiences and context rather than simple coding — much in the same way we humans learn.

Giving computers the ability to develop more human-like learning capabilities makes them useful in not just novel things like generating images or translating cat purrs, but by leveraging data in a variety of industries as well, including finance, healthcare, education and even archaeology.

Want to Learn More? What Is Machine Learning and How Does It Work?

What Is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses statistics, trial and error, and mountains of data to learn a specific task without ever having to be specifically programmed to do that task.

While most computer programs rely on code to tell them what to do and how to do it, computers that use machine learning use tacit knowledge — the knowledge we gain from personal experience or context. This process relies on algorithms and models, or statistical equations that are developed over time based on the data at hand. The learning process, also known as training, involves identifying patterns in data, and then optimizing those findings through both trial and error and feedback.

Because machine learning systems can learn from experience, just as humans do, they don’t have to rely on billions of lines of code. And their ability to use tacit knowledge means they can independently problem-solve, make connections, discover patterns and even make predictions based on what it can extract from data. This makes them especially useful in building recommendation engines, accurately predicting online search patterns and fraud detection, among other things.

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The Importance of Machine Learning Tools

Like all systems that use AI, machine learning requires algorithms to act as a sort of guide for the system, and these algorithms are created using machine learning tools and software. A machine learning model is trained with an algorithm to recognize patterns and provide predictions. And as new data is fed into these algorithms, they learn and improve their performance, developing a sort of intelligence over time.

There are hundreds of algorithms computers can use based on things like data size and diversity, but they can largely be put into four different categories, depending on how much human intervention is required to ensure their accuracy over time.

How to Choose a Machine Learning Tool 

When choosing a machine learning tool, it’s important to assess your needs, including what you’d like your machine learning model to accomplish and what customizations need to be made during development. Not all tools are the same; some may excel in training models for one area of machine learning, like deep learning or data science. They also each operate under their own programming languages and data scaling capabilities, which determine how data is processed, how a model performs computations and how many users may be able to access the model at once. 

Before building a machine learning model, decide how you’d like to train it during development — either by supervised learning or unsupervised learning (or both) — and ensure your tool of choice can support this. Additionally, take into account your model’s intended parameters, plus how you plan to have data analyzed and scaled across the model (whether on hardware, software or in the cloud).

Of course, in an area as vast and complex as machine learning, there is no jack of all trades — no one model can fix everything or do everything. So there are lots of machine learning tools out there.

Listed below are some of the most popular ones.

Machine Learning Tools to Know

APACHE MAHOUT

Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, Mahout is an open-source library of machine learning algorithms, implemented on top of Apache Hadoop. It is most commonly used by mathematicians, data scientists and statisticians to quickly find meaningful patterns in very large data sets. In practice, it is especially useful in building intelligent applications that can learn from user behavior and make recommendations accordingly.

AWS MACHINE LEARNING

AWS Machine Learning offers a variety of tools designed to help developers discover patterns in user data through algorithms, construct mathematical models based on those patterns, and generate predictions from those models. Some of its free product offerings include Amazon Rekognition, which identifies objects, people, text and activities in images and video; and Amazon SageMaker, which helps developers and data scientists build, train and deploy machine learning models for any use case.

BIGML

BigML provides machine learning algorithms that allow users to load their own data sets, build and share their models, train and evaluate their models and generate new predictions either singularly or in a batch. And all of the predictive models created on BigML come with interactive visualizations and explainability features that make them more interpretable. Today, the platform is used across a variety of industries, from aerospace to healthcare, according to the company.

COLAB 

Google’s Colab, short for Colaboratory, is a cloud service that helps developers build machine learning applications using the libraries of PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras and OpenCV. It allows users to combine this code with rich text, images, HTML and more into a single document in order to build and train machine learning models. These models can then be stored on a Google Drive, shared and edited by others.

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GOOGLE CLOUD AUTOML

Based on the tech giant’s state-of-the-art transfer learning and neural architecture search technology, Google Cloud AutoML is a collection of machine learning products that helps developers train high-quality models for whatever they need them for, even if they have limited machine learning experience. The autoML tool allows users to evaluate, enhance and deploy their models, as well as train. They can also generate predictions on their trained models and securely store whatever data they need in the cloud.

IBM Watson Studio

IBM’s Watson is among the most familiar players in not just machine learning, but also cognitive computing and artificial intelligence in general since it won a game of Jeopardy! in 2011 against two human champions. Today, the IBM Watson Studio helps developers put their machine learning and deep learning models into production, offering tools for data analysis and visualization, as well as cleaning and shaping data.

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MICROSOFT AZURE MACHINE LEARNING

Azure Machine Learning offers everything developers need to build, test and deploy their machine learning models, placing an emphasis on security. Its collaborative, drag-and-drop design takes developers throughout the entire machine learning process, and comes with features for data exploration preparation, model training and development, model validation, as well as continuous monitoring and management of the model. Plus, the tool requires no programming — rather, it visually connects the data sets and modules to help users build their predictive analysis model.

OPENNN

Short for Open Neural Networks Library, OpenNN is a software library that implements neural networks, a key area of deep machine learning research. It is written in C++ programming language and the entire library can be downloaded for free from GitHub or SourceForge.

PYTORCH

PyTorch is an open-source tool that helps with deep learning and machine learning model development. The platform offers tensor computing, neural networks, and a host of machine learning libraries and tools. PyTorch also has additional wrappers — PyTorch Lightning and PyTorch Ignite — both of which are meant primarily to expand on research capabilities and diminish the need for redundant code.

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SCIKIT-LEARN

Scikit-learn is among the most used libraries for machine learning. It is Python-based, and contains an array of tools for machine learning and statistical modeling, including classification, regression and model selecting. Because scikit-learn’s documentation is known for being detailed and easily readable, both beginners and experts alike are able to unwrap the code and gain deeper insight into their models. And because it is an open-source library with an active community, it is a go-to place to ask questions and learn more about machine learning.

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SHOGUN

Shogun is a free, open-source machine learning software library that offers numerous algorithms and data structures for machine learning problems. It also offers interfaces for many languages, including Python, R, Java, Octave and Ruby. This is one of the more “underrated” libraries for machine learning, according to Emmett Boudreau, a popular contributor to the Towards Data Science blog — likely due to its smaller user base and maintainer list. But Boudreau said the Shogun library is more established language-wise, which leads to more accessibility both cross-platform and in different applications.

TensorFlow

Initially developed by Google, TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework, offering a variety of tools, libraries and resources that allow users to build, train and deploy their own machine learning models. It supports a wide range of solutions, including natural language processing, computer vision, predictive machine learning and reinforcement learning. While TensorFlow does offer some pre-built models for simpler solutions, it mostly requires developers to work closely with a given model’s code, which means they can achieve full control in training the model from scratch. TensorFlow also has a deep learning API for Keras, called tf.keras.

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VERTEX AI

Also a product of Google, Vertex AI unifies several processes within the machine learning workflow, enabling users to train their machine learning models, host those models within the cloud and use their models to reach conclusions about large amounts of data. While Vertex AI comes with pre-trained models, users can also generate their own models by leveraging Python-based toolkits like PyTorch, scikit-learn and TensorFlow.

WEKA

Weka is a free collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks, offering tools for data preparation, classification, regression, clustering, association rules mining and visualization. When a data set is fed in Weka, it explores the hyperparameter settings for several algorithms and recommends the most preferred one using a fully automated approach. Developed at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, Weka was named after a flightless bird found only on the island that is known for its inquisitive nature.

XGBOOST

Short for Extreme Gradient Boosting, XGBoost is an open-source machine learning software library. The platform provides parallel tree boosting in order to solve many data science issues quickly, meaning several tree-based algorithms can be used to achieve the optimal model sequence. Plus, with gradient boosting, XGBoost grows the trees one after another so that the following trees can learn from the weaknesses and mistakes of the previous ones, as well as borrow information from the previous tree model.