Data can be used to provide a huge competitive advantage to a company. A sophisticated analytics platform that uses historical and real-time data to deliver insights and predict future events can help an organization improve decision-making, optimize business processes, and ultimately get ahead of the competition
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But advanced analytics solutions have their own learning curve and challenges, and too many false starts and inaccurate predictions can cause users to lose trust in the platform. Our team at BlueGranite is using Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) for data science and predictive analytics, and we built a series of free labs to help you use it, too.
Let’s take a look at Azure ML and the three labs that can help you get started.
What is Azure ML and What Does it Do?
Part of Microsoft’s Azure ecosystem, Azure ML is a powerful cloud-based predictive analytics service that can be used by organizations, data scientists, and users of all skill levels. It contains built-in algorithms and modules, a drag-and-drop interface for building models, and a fully-managed service used to publish models as easily consumable web services. This allows organizations to quickly operationalize and manage their predictive models, easily integrating them into existing analytics environments including Hadoop, Azure SQL databases, and traditional SQL Server instances.
With Azure ML Studio, you can import training data and then build, train and deploy machine learning models to recognize patterns and predict outcomes, all from a web browser. It also has support for data science programming languages like R and Python, which means you can now integrate Python, R, and machine learning algorithms all into a single workflow.
What Labs are Available?
Our labs focus on three topics: an introduction to Azure ML, text analytics with R and Azure ML, and deploying predictive models with Azure ML.
Introduction to Azure ML: This lab allows you to explore and visualize data in ML Studio and gives you the chance to create a simple predictive model.
Text Analytics with R and Azure ML: In this lab, you’ll learn how to use R scripts in ML Studio to perform advanced analytics.
Deploying Predictive Models with Azure ML: This lab teaches you how to deploy a predictive model as a Web service in ML Studio.
How do I Use the Labs?
Use these labs to learn how to build a real solution in Azure ML. Each one contains a video in addition to step-by-step documentation. If you don’t have access to Microsoft’s Azure services, take advantage of its free trial offer.
Want to learn more? BlueGranite can help. Our team of data integration and analytics experts can assist you with on-site training or an initial POC or pilot solution using Azure ML. Contact us to get started.
