An Introduction to Data Science on Azure | Nick Wienholt

Microsoft Azure provides a rich canvas for data science research and execution.

Two of the key components of the data science toolkit are Azure Notebooks and the Azure Machine Learning service. In this presentation, Nick will introduce the core concepts of data science and show how a data set can be imported, analysed and used as the basis for a predictive model using these two Azure components.

Azure Notebooks are an implementation of the Jupyter notebook technology (formerly IPython notebooks) that allows code and markdown to be created in a browser document for interactive execution. Jupyter notebooks attach to a back-end kernel for code execution, and can support much greater computational loads and richer functionality than client-side Javascript technology.

By supporting the mixing of documentation and live code, Azure Notebooks are an ideal technology for conducting and sharing data exploration exercises, and solve a number of issues that occur when analysis and the documentation are handled separately. Azure Notebooks currently support Python 2, Python 3, R and F#.

Azure Machine Learning is part of the Cortana Intelligence suite, and allows for the interactive creation of experiments supporting a wide range of machine learning algorithms. The machine learning experiments can be evaluated for effectiveness, and easily turned into web service endpoints for machine learning prediction based on live data.

This presentation assumes no prior experience with machine learning, and will introduce the topics for a traditional software developers perspective.