What would be the easiest way to get started with machine learning?
I have a very practical application for it.
A few managers threw a data warehouse of “stuff” in my lap asking me to tell them what is driving sales.
The data includes:
sales by client (clients being doctors offices)
sales by doctor
products they bought
client demographics
all kinds of different date information
To summarize the data, it is basically the complete data of EVERY transaction the company conducted with all of their clients and detailed information for every transaction.
The data is all stored in sql server 2008.
Question: Are there any tools that already exist in c#/python that I can hook up to the database that will start analyzing trends/patterns/relationships?
More specifically:
How can I apply a machine learning algorithm using python or c# to my data in order to extract some kind of meaningful information?
Google has a prediction / machine-learning API which is pretty awesome if you’re more interested in the results than the understanding (although it will certainly be helpful to have some background so you can know things like if what you’re trying to do even makes sense).
https://developers.google.com/prediction/