Machine Learning has come a long way since its dawn, and now we see it everywhere. The social media applications we use, the online stores we purchase from, the maps we use every day to navigate from point A to point B and these are just the tip of the iceberg. The potential is unlimited. Earlier only data scientists or only those who know the subject deeply used Machine Learning. However, the way Machine Learning has captured the businesses it is impossible to not use by commoners who have very less knowledge about how the data is cooked. For those of us who are really naive in Machine Learning, companies like IBM and Microsoft have built Machine Learning API’s which are user friendly and intuitive to navigate.
Five most popular and best Machine Learning API’s for data science applications
IBM Watson
IBM has been busy with many things; its cloud services are one of the best rated ones in the market. IBM Bluemix cloud platform is now hosting IBM Watson a machine learning tool for Self-service business intelligence. Just like the other tools out there IBM Watson also packs a punch with its deep integration with more than 30 different databases and 32 data connectors that comes with the plan you choose. There is a free trial edition, so before you go online to shop for some ML API’s or tools, you need to try this one. There are two versions of the product, the plus version will charge around $30 per user per month and the professional version which is more suitable for enterprise use will charge $80 per user per month. Obviously, the Professional edition has more data connectors and more cloud storage with better visualization formats. However, if you are just trying this out for the first time and you can go ahead and choose the plus version, you won’t be missing on too many things. The one thing which may disappoint many users is the lack of streaming analytics. However, to compensate this issue it has got a data refresh rate as low as 5 seconds. This should be do the job for most applications but if you are keen on streaming analytics IBM Watson may not be the best option.
Microsoft Power BI
This is similar to IBM Watson in many ways, but the price tag is way less at $9.99 per user per month. This competes strongly with IBM Watson and it has all the capabilities like intuitive user interface with great visualization tools and also Microsoft Power BI has 74 data connectors which is way more than what IBM Watson is offering. This also supports streaming analytics. However, the basic or free version can only do it at 10,000 rows per hour. The priced plan can do it at 1 million rows per hour which is pretty fast. This product is both useful for personal use as well as enterprise use.
Google Prediction API
This is nothing like the above too Machine Learning tools. The user interface is not that easy to navigate, and it is pretty hard to get through the platform even for the developers. On the bright side, it does have some amazing features like Sentiment prediction, Tag categorization and Language identifier. The pricing also starts at $10 per user per month. The free trial is very generous with $300 credits spread across 60 days. However, this is definitely not the best platform out there.
Big ML
Big ML is one of the highly scalable cloud platforms in the market today. The whole platform is fast, the user interface is descent with no hiccups and the pricing is subscription and not pay as you go! There are really a variety of subscription plans to choose from and apart from standard priced at $240/year, all the other plans are pretty expensive. This is suitable for both enterprise as well as personal purposes. However, if you are an individual looking for ML API, go for something as simple as IBM Watson or Power BI.
Amazon Machine Learning API
Amazon Machine Learning API really integrates a lot of things and the results are more accurate than Google Predictions API or Big ML. For all practical purposes, AML API has the best possible features in the market. Though the training time is considerably more when compared to other ML API’s, the accuracy is commendable.
There a ton of options available and the five mentioned in this article are just a few among other great platforms. You can’t choose a platform according to numbers and opinions. These days most of these platforms come with free trials, so go ahead and try them out before you really buy the service.
