Books, Tutorials and Talks

This page collects talks, tutorials, articles, books, slides, and lectures about Apache Mahout, from the current Qumat and QDP work back to the Hadoop-era releases. No endorsements are implied or given. To add an entry, open a pull request against this page or email dev@mahout.apache.org.

For general background on linear algebra, statistics, and machine learning, see Reference Reading.

Books

Qumat and quantum computing

• Quantum Computing Primer - A ten-chapter introduction to quantum computing using Qumat, maintained in these docs.
• Research Papers - Papers and publications related to Qumat and quantum machine learning.

Mahout specific

• Apache Mahout: Beyond MapReduce by Dmitriy Lyubimov and Andrew Palumbo published Feb 2016. Covers new features in Mahout "Samsara" releases (0.10, 0.11+).
• Apache Mahout cookbook- Book by Piero Giacomelli published Dec 2013 by Packtpub.
• Mahout in Action - Book by Sean Owen, Robin Anil, Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman published Oct 2011 by Manning Publications.
• Taming Text - By Grant Ingersoll and Tom Morton, published by Manning Publications. Will have some Mahout coverage, but by no means as complete as Mahout in Action.

Engineering oriented machine learning books

• Collective Intelligence in Action
• Programming Collective Intelligence
• Algorithms of the Intelligent Web

Scientific background

• Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
• Introduction to Information Retrieval
• Machine Learning
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)

News, Articles and Tutorials

Qumat and QDP

• Introducing QuMat v0.6.0 - AMD ROCm support, six QDP encodings with CUDA/ROCm parity, and real-workload benchmarks, June 2026
• QuMat v0.5.0 release - First public QDP proof of concept for GPU state preparation, February 2026
• QuMat v0.4.0 release - April 2025
• Getting Started with Qumat and Getting Started with QDP - The official quickstarts

Mahout Classic

• Mahout 0.10.x: first Mahout release as a programming environment
• Comparing Document Classification Functions of Lucene and Mahout
• Apache Mahout: Scalable Machine Learning for Everyone
• How to build a spam filter server with Mahout - Applying classification on a live server - April 2011
• Deploying a massively scalable recommender system with Apache Mahout - Blogpost of Sebastian Schelter in April 2011
• Apache Mahout & the commoditization of machine learning - Podcast interview with Grant Ingersoll at ApacheCon 2010
• Apache Mahout 0.4 mit neuen Algorithmen - published after the 0.4 release by heise Open/ Developer, November 2010
• Mahout on InfoQ - Interview with Grant Ingersoll on InfoQ
• Mahout in the Cloudera weblog - published after the Hadoop user group UK.
• Mahout in the Drools weblog - Michael Neale published an article on Mahout in the drools weblog
• Introducing Apache Mahout - Grant Ingersoll - Intro to Apache Mahout focused on clustering, classification and collaborative filtering. Japanese translation available at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/jp/java/library/j-mahout/
• Flexible Collaborative Filtering In Java With Mahout Taste - Philippe Adjiman - Quick starting guide on how to use the collaborative filtering package of Mahout (called Taste) to quickly and flexibly create, test and compare tailored recommendation engines.
• Integrating Mahout with Lucene and Solr Three part series on ways to integrate Mahout with Lucene and Solr
• Mahout Item Recommender Tutorial using Java and Eclipse - YouTube video tutorial by Steve Cook

Coursework/Lectures

• http://videolectures.net/mlss05us_chicago/
• http://videolectures.net/mlas06_pittsburgh/
• Stanford Lectures on Machine Learning by Andrew Ng
• CMU@Qatar Introduction to Mahout lecture

Talks

In reverse chronological order, so that most recent talks are at the top.

Qumat and QDP

• Accelerating Quantum Machine Learning: Building a GPU-Accelerated Data Plane in Apache Mahout - Jie-Kai Chang and Guan-Hua Wen at Community Over Code Asia 2026, Beijing, August 8, 2026.
• Introducing Qumat! - FOSDEM 2025, Brussels, February 2025.
• QuMat: Apache Mahout's Quantum Computing Interface - FOSSY 2024, Portland, August 2024.

Mahout Classic

• Distributed Machine Learning with Apache Mahout - Suneel Marthi at Apache Big Data North America, Vancouver, Canada, May 11, 2016 and MapR Washington DC Big Data Everywhere, Tysons, VA, June 2 2016
• Declarative Machine Learning with the Samsara DSL Sebastian Schelter at Flink Forward Conference, Berlin Germany, October 2015.
• Bringing Algebraic Semantics to Mahout Sebastian Schelter at HPI Infolunch, Potsdam Germany, May 2014
• Mahout Spark and Scala bindings: Bringing Algebraic Semantics (slides/video) - Dmitriy Lyubimov at Mahout Meetup, April 17, 2014.
• Mahout Future Directions - Ted Dunning, Suneel Marthi, Sebastian Schelter at Hadoop Summit Europe 2014, Amsterdam, April 3, 2014
• Building Recommender Systems for Mere-Mortals - Sebastian Schelter at Researchgate Developer Day, Berlin, November 2013
• Recommendations with Apache Mahout - Sebastian Schelter at IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, September 2013
• Next Directions in Mahout’s Recommenders - Sebastian Schelter at Bay Area Mahout Meetup, Redwood City, August 2013
• New Directions in Mahout’s Recommenders - Sebastian Schelter at Recommender Systems Get Together Berlin, April 2013
• Introduction to Mahout and Machine Learning - Slides by Varad Meru, Software Development Engineer at Orzota. July 27th, 2013.
• An Introduction to Collaborative Filtering with Apache Mahout - Sebastian Schelter at Recommender Systems Challenge Workshop in conjunction with ACM RecSys 2012, Dublin, September 2012
• How to build a recommender system based on Mahout and JavaEE - Slides by Manuel Blechschmidt at Berlin Expert Days March, 2012.
• Apache Mahout for intelligent data analysis - Slides from Isabel Drost at Apache Con NA November, 2011.
• Dr. Mahout: Analyzing clinical data using scalable and distributed computing - Slides from Shannon Quinn at Apache Con NA November, 2011.
• Frank Scholten at Berlin Buzzwords on June 7, 2011.
• Introduction to Collaborative Filtering using Mahout (updated) - Talk by Sean Owen at the London Hadoop User Group on April 14, 2011.
• Cool Tricks with Classifiers - Talk by Ted Dunning at the Los Angeles HUG talking about Mahout classifiers on March 16, 2011.
• First Mahout Hackathon, Berlin, March 2011
• Mahout meetup - there were two talks at the Apache Mahout meetup at JTeam in Amsterdam, February 2011. intro slides
• Mahout clustering - Talk on Mahout clustering at data dev room FOSDEM, February 2011.
• Scaling Data Analysis with Apache Mahout - talk on Mahout at O'Reilly Strata, February 2011.
• Practical Machine Learning - Slides from Biju B and Jaganadh G, FOSSMEET-NITC, Calicut, India, February 2011.
• Mahout at AlphaCSPs The Edge 2010 (pdf) - slideshare - Slides from Ariel Kogan AlphaCSP's The Edge, December 2010.
• Intelligent data analysis with Apache Mahout - Slides from Isabel Drost, Devoxx Antwerp, November 2010.
• Apache Mahout introduction - Slides from Isabel Drost, codebits Lisbon, November 2010.
• Apache Mahout - Making Data Analysis Easy - Slides from Isabel Drost, Apache Con US Atlanta, November 2010.
• Practical Machine Learning - Slides from Jaganadh G, BarCamp Kerala 9, November 2010.
• Mahout and its new classification framework - Slides from Ted Dunning, SDForum, November 2010.
• Distributed Item-based Collaborative Filtering with Apache Mahout - Slides from Sebastian Schelter, Hadoop Get Together Berlin, October 2010.
• Hidden Markov Models for Mahout - Slides from Max Heimel, Hadoop Get Together Berlin, October 2010.
• Apache Mahout Mammoth Scale Machine Learning - Slides from Robin Anil, OSCON 2010.
• Intro to Apache Mahout - Slides from Grant Ingersoll, RTP Semantic Web Group.
• Case study: Biometric Databases and Hadoop - Slides from Jason Trost, Hadoop Summit 2010.
• Spam Fighting at Yahoo
• Web Mining with Ken Krugler
• Keynote on intelligent search - Slides from Grant Ingersoll, Berlin Buzzwords, June 2010.
• Simple co-occurrence-based recommendation on Hadoop - Slides from Sean Owen, Berlin Buzzwords, June, 2010.
• Introduction to Collaborative Filtering using Mahout - Slides from Frank Scholten, Berlin Buzzwords, June, 2010.
• Introduction to Scalable Machine Learning - Slides and demos from Grant Ingersoll, March, 2010.
• Mahout @ India Hadoop Summit - Slides from a 1 hour talk on Mahout at the India Hadoop Summit by Robin Anil, February 2010.
• Mahout in 10 minutes - Slides from a 10 min intro to Mahout at the Map Reduce tutorial by David Zülke at Open Source Expo in Karlsruhe, Isabel Drost, November 2009.
• Mahout at Apache Con US - Slides from a talk on "Going from raw data to information" (with Mahout) at Apache Con US in Oakland, Isabel Drost, November 2009.
• Mahout at FrOSCon - Slides from a talk on Mahout at FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Isabel Drost, August 2009.
• Mahout at DAI group TU Berlin - Slides from a talk on Mahout at the DAI Laboratories TU Berlin, Isabel Drost, July 2009.
• Mahout at Machine Learning Group TU Berlin - Slides from a talk on Hadoop with some detour to Mahout at the Machine Learning Group of Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller at TU Berlin, Isabel Drost, June 2009.
• Mahout at Google Zürich - Slides from a Google tech-talk on the past, present and future of Mahout, Isabel Drost, May 2009.
• Hadoop user group UK - Slides from a talk on April 14, 2009 at the Hadoop User Group UK in London, Isabel Drost, April 2009.
• BI Over Petabytes: Meet Apache Mahout - Slides from a talk by Jeff Eastman on April 21, 2009 at the Bay Area SD Forum Business Intelligence SIG meeting at SAP in Palo Alto, CA.
• Lucene Meetup and Apache Barcamp in Amsterdam, March 2009.
• BarCampRDU - (Raleigh) on Aug. 2, 2008
• Introducing Mahout: Apache Machine Learning - Committer Grant Ingersoll gave a gentle introduction to Mahout and Machine Learning at ApacheCon in November (3rd through 7th) in New Orleans, USA.
• Mahout: Scaling Machine Learning - Introduction to Mahout and machine learning at FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin/Germany, Isabel Drost, August 2008. (slides)
• Mahout: Scalable Machine Learning - An introduction to Mahout and machine learning at the first German Hadoop gathering in newthinking store/ Berlin, Isabel Drost, July 2008.
• Apache Mahout: Industrial Strength Machine Learning - Committer Jeff Eastman gave an introduction to Mahout at Yahoo!, May 2008
• Apache Lucene - Mach's wie Google - Bernd Fondermann presented an overview of the Apache Lucene project, including Mahout at Open Source Expo 2008 in Karlsruhe, May 2008.
• Apache Mahout: Bringing Machine Learning to Industrial Strength - Committer Isabel Drost gave a Fast Feather introduction the the new project Mahout at Apache Con EU April, 2008