H2O (software)

H2O

Original author(s)	H2O.ai
Developer(s)	H2O.ai
Stable release	Turchin (Version 3.8.2.9) / June 9, 2016 (2016-06-09)
Repository	github.com/h2oai/h2o-3
Development status	Active
Written in	H2O (written in Java, Python, and R)[1][2][3]
Operating system	Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows
Platform	Apache Hadoop Distributed File System; Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure.
Available in	English
Type	big data analytics, machine learning, statistical learning theory[4]
License	Apache license 2.0[5]
Alexa rank	606,809[6]
Website	www.h2o.ai
Standard(s)	Databricks certified on Spark.[3]
As of	1 June 2015

H2O is open-source software for big-data analysis. It is produced by the start-up H2O.ai (formerly 0xdata), which launched in 2011 in Silicon Valley. The speed and flexibility of H2O allow users to fit hundreds or thousands of potential models as part of discovering patterns in data. With H2O, users can throw models at data to find usable information, allowing H2O to discover patterns. Using H2O, Cisco estimates each month 20 thousand models of its customers' propensities to buy.^[7]

H2O's mathematical core is developed with the leadership of Arno Candel; after H2O was rated as the best "open-source Java machine learning project" by GitHub's programming members, Candel was named to the first class of "Big Data All Stars" by Fortune in 2014.^[8] The firm's scientific advisors are experts on statistical learning theory and mathematical optimization.

The H2O software runs can be called from the statistical package R and other environments. It is used for exploring and analyzing datasets held in cloud computing systems and in the Apache Hadoop Distributed File System as well as in the conventional operating-systems Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. The H2O software is written in Java, Python, and R. Its graphical-user interface is compatible with four popular browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

H2O

The H2O project aims to develop an analytical interface for cloud computing, providing users with intuitive tools for data analysis.^[1]

Leadership

H2O.ai was co-founded by Cliff Click and SriSatish Ambati. (Photograph by H2O.ai released under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license.)

H2O's chief executive, SriSatish Ambati, had helped to start Platfora, a big-data firm that develops software for the Apache Hadoop distributed file system.^[9] Ambati was frustrated with the performance of the R programming language on large data-sets and started the development of H2O software with encouragement from John Chambers,^[2] who created the S programming language at Bell Labs and who is a member of R's core team (which leads the development of R).^[2][10][11]

Ambati co-founded 0xdata with Cliff Click, who served as the chief technical officer of H2O and helped create much of H2O's product. Click helped to write the HotSpot Server Compiler and worked with Azul Systems to construct a big-data Java virtual machine (JVM).^[12] Click left H2O in February 2016.^[13]

Mathematical leadership is provided by the Dr. Arno Candel, who has the title "physicist and hacker". Candel was a founding engineer at Skytree, where he implemented methods for machine learning, before he developed the mathematical core of H2O. After H2O was rated as the best "open-source Java machine learning project" by GitHub's programming members, Candel (with 19 others) was named to the first class of "Big Data All Stars" by Fortune.^[8]

Scientific advisory council

Stanford University professor Trevor J. Hastie serves as an advisor to H2O.ai.

H2O's Scientific Advisory Council lists three mathematical scientists, who are all professors at Stanford University:^[14] Professor Stephen P. Boyd is an expert in convex minimization and applications in statistics and electrical engineering.^[15] Robert Tibshirani, a collaborator with Bradley Efron on bootstrapping,^[16] is an expert on generalized additive models and statistical learning theory.^[17][18] Trevor Hastie, a collaborator of John Chambers on S,^[11] is an expert on generalized additive models and statistical learning theory.^[17][18]

H2O.ai: A Silicon Valley start-up

The software is open-source and freely distributed. The company receives fees for providing customer service and customized extensions. In November 2014, its twenty clients included Cisco, eBay, Nielsen, and PayPal, according to VentureBeat.^[2] The speed and flexibility of H2O allow users to fit hundreds or thousands of potential models as part of discovering patterns in data. With H2O, users can throw models at data to find usable information, according to Tye Rattenbury at Trifacta. Using H2O, Cisco estimates each month 20 thousand models of its customers' propensities to buy while Google fits different models for each client according to the time of day.^[7]

Mining of big data

Machine learning and data mining
Problems Classification Clustering Regression Anomaly detection Association rules Reinforcement learning Structured prediction Feature engineering Feature learning Online learning Semi-supervised learning Unsupervised learning Learning to rank Grammar induction
Supervised learning (classification • regression) Decision trees Ensembles (Bagging, Boosting, Random forest) k-NN Linear regression Naive Bayes Neural networks Logistic regression Perceptron Relevance vector machine (RVM) Support vector machine (SVM)
Clustering BIRCH Hierarchical k-means Expectation-maximization (EM) DBSCAN OPTICS Mean-shift
Dimensionality reduction Factor analysis CCA ICA LDA NMF PCA t-SNE
Structured prediction Graphical models (Bayes net, CRF, HMM)
Anomaly detection k-NN Local outlier factor
Neural nets Autoencoder Deep learning Multilayer perceptron RNN Restricted Boltzmann machine SOM Convolutional neural network
Reinforcement Learning Q-Learning SARSA Temporal Difference (TD)
Theory Bias-variance dilemma Computational learning theory Empirical risk minimization Occam learning PAC learning Statistical learning VC theory
Machine learning venues NIPS ICML IJMLC ML JMLR ArXiv:cs.LG
Machine learning portal

Big datasets are too large to be analyzed using traditional software like R. The H2O software provides data structures and methods suitable for big data.

H2O allow users to analyze and visualize whole sets of data without using the Procrustean strategy of studying only a small subset with a conventional statistical package.^[2] H2O's statistical repertoire includes generalized linear models and K-means clustering.^[19]

Iterative methods for real-time problems

H2O uses iterative methods that provide quick answers using all of the client's data. When a client cannot wait for an optimal solution, the client can interrupt the computations and use an approximate solution.^[1]

In its approach to deep learning,^[2][19][20] H2O divides all the data into subsets and then analyzing each subset simultaneously using the same method. These processes are combined to estimate parameters by using the Hogwild scheme,^[21] a parallel stochastic gradient method.^[22] These methods allow H2O to provide answers that use all the client's data, rather than throwing away most of it and analyzing a subset with conventional software.

Software

Programming languages

The H2O software has an interface to the following programming languages: Java (6 or later), Python (2.7.x, 3.5.x), R (3.0.0 or later) and Scala (1.4-1.6).^[2][3]

Operating systems

The H2O software can be run on conventional operating-systems: Microsoft Windows (7 or later), Mac OS X (10.9 or later), and Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 ; RHEL/CentOS 6 or later),^[3] It also runs on big-data systems, particularly Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), several popular versions: Cloudera (5.1 or later), MapR (3.0 or later), and Hortonworks (HDP 2.1 or later). It also operates on cloud computing environments, for example using Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure. The H2O Sparkling Water software is Databricks-certified on Apache Spark.^[3]

Graphical user interface and browsers

Its graphical user interface is compatible with four browsers (unless specified, in their latest versions as of 1 June 2015): Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE10).^[3]

Notes

References

• Gage, Deborah (15 April 2013). "Platfora founder goes in search of big-data answers". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2 June 2015. 
• Hackett, Robert (3 August 2014), Nusca, Andrew; Hackett, Robert; Gupta, Shalene, eds., "Arno Candel, physicist and hacker, 0xdata", Fortune, Meet Fortune's 2014 Big Data All-Stars, retrieved 2 June 2015 
• Hardy, Quentin (3 May 2014). "Valuable humans in our digital future". New York Times. Retrieved 1 June 2015. 
• Harris, Derrick (14 August 2012). "How 0xdata wants to help everyone become data scientists". Gigaom Research. Retrieved 1 June 2015. 
• Novet, Jordan (7 November 2014). "0xdata takes $8.9M and becomes H2O to match its open-source machine-learning project". VentureBeat. Retrieved 1 June 2015. 

External links

• H2O software at H2O.ai (formerly 0xdata)
• Github repository of H2O software
• YouTube channel of H2O.ai