PASS Summit 14 Day 1 keynote and Joseph Sirosh and Sanjay Somi demo’d Azure Machine Learning (ML) and the drive to ‘democratize’ predictive analytics.

The basic idea behind ML is computers learning through “training” how to look for patterns and relationships in complex data, without being explicitly programmed to find a particular “answer”. Through iteration, using “gradient descent” descent techniques, we finely tune a ‘predictor algorithm’ to further and further minimize its degree of inaccuracy, to the point where it can make useful predictions when exposed to completely new data.

Azure ML is a fully-managed cloud service that, via Azure ML Studio, will let you build machine learning models via “drag and drop”, and also provides built in models that power the likes of Bing and Xbox. We can publish APIs to insert those models into applications. For the more experienced data scientist, it also supports R packages.

It’s impressive, and allegedly so easy your high school son could do it!