At first glance, this looks to go somewhat beyond Google's Prediction API, which (at least from my experience) is pretty limited in its usefulness.
Its nice to see tools for analyzing your data as well as multi-class classification, and some tune-able parameters but this doesn't seem to bring anything 'new' to the game.
All the hard parts, feature selection, noise, unlabeled data, etc are still up to the end user, which makes me wonder how many people will try this out and get poor results.
It would be nice to get an idea of what sort of model they are using on the backend or even having a choice of models.
The system also uses logistic regression and is limited to 100 gb dataset. Prediction with LR isn't that expensive and training can be done online with something like stochastic gradient descent. That can be done on a single computer. Given that the models aren't exportable and you can import a model, I'm hard pressed to see the immediate value. Long term, though, I'm sure there's plenty of growth.
It's kind of unclear, but it looks from the screenshots as if AWS is doing feature selection behind the scenes. But it seems that unless AWS does feature selection or model selection really efficiently behind the scenes, the cost of that extra work time is placed on the user.
This may be different now, but when I used Prediction API a few years ago, I don't remember it having any data analysis tools or multi-class classification. The UI was also pretty lacking. Haven't looked at in a while but perhaps it has gotten better?
Its nice to see tools for analyzing your data as well as multi-class classification, and some tune-able parameters but this doesn't seem to bring anything 'new' to the game.
All the hard parts, feature selection, noise, unlabeled data, etc are still up to the end user, which makes me wonder how many people will try this out and get poor results.
It would be nice to get an idea of what sort of model they are using on the backend or even having a choice of models.