There are no silver bullets - neither in software engineering nor in "data science". There is a lot of hype around big data in general and machine learning in particular. This talk highlights some common use cases of machine learning, detailing when to approach a problem with Mahout - and when to opt for other tools instead.
Over the past months several problems have been brought up on the Mahout mailing list - some a perfect fit for Mahout, some better solved with other tools. The goal of this talk is to give a rough overview of some of the tools that can help with data analysis - providing advise on when to go for Mahout - as well as when to use other means.