Prediction API: Tunable predictive models

By Travis Green, Product Manager

Over the last year, the Prediction API has given you more and more tools to make your apps smarter and teach them to adapt and learn. Today we're adding a frequently requested feature: the ability to adjust models to get better performance.

Historically, getting the right predictive model has required detailed knowledge of algorithmic behavior and experience with similar datasets, and a lot of guess-and-check. With the Prediction API, we ask you what behavior you want to see, and search across many algorithms to find the best-matching one.

How it works:

1. Upload data to Google Storage for Developers.
2. Ask the Prediction API to find a great predictive model.
3. [new] Examine more detailed statistics about your model’s performance, including more training metadata and better accuracy statistics through a confusion matrix.
4. Improve performance.
1. Give your model more samples to learn from.
2. Add in more information (see these samples).
3. [new] Show the API what data is most important (categorical data only).

For those of you ready to get started, feel free to jump in through our newly updated code samples.

Travis Green's favorite part about his job is designing smart applications. In his spare time, he is in the great outdoors (looking for trouble).

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor