Machine Learning with WEKA: An Interview with Mark Hall

[ Thanks to Edwood
Ocasio for this link. ]

“F4S: Why and when did WEKA come to be?

“WEKA grew out of a project funded by the New Zealand government
in the early 1990′s for investigating the application of
machine learning to agricultural domains. The software came about
through the perceived need for a unified workbench that would
allow researchers easy access to state-of-the-art techniques in
machine learning. At the time of the project?s inception in 1992,
learning algorithms were available in various languages, for use on
different platforms, and operated on a variety of data formats.

“F4S: In which language(s) and platform(s) is the project
developed?

“Originally, the workbench was developed to run under Unix
systems and was written primarily in C, with some Prolog-based
evaluation routines and a TCL/TK-based user interface. However, by
the late 1990′s it was becoming difficult to maintain and
difficult for users to get installed and working. This was due to
factors such as changes to supporting libraries, management of
dependencies and complexity of configuration. In 1999 the software
was completely re-written in Java.”

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