Machine Learning : and last but not least, with existing and new features for SAP HANA, the announcements of SAP Leonardo, and the availability of SAP HANA, express edition, it’s now easier like never before to try to build your predictive model using out of the box algorithms.
- Computers learn from data without being explicitly programmed.
- Machines can see, read, listen,understand, and interact.
How enterprise data is transformed into business value with Machine learning
How to apply Machine Learning with SAP
How to measure success of Machine Learning models,
you might be wondering how you can actually apply it into your own SAP
landscape. SAP has quite a broad offering and making the right choice can be
tough.
SAP HANA is a core
technology in the SAP landscape. For Machine Learning (ML) this is true to a
large degree as well. HANA has various architectural options for ML.
Automated
Predictive Library (APL)
This library is aimed at automating several steps
of ML. Among other things, it generates and picks the best model to do the job.
Although it does run on HANA, it is not part of the standard HANA license.
Predictive
Analysis Library (PAL)
This is an extensive set of ML algorithms available
by default in a HANA installation.
It includes areas like regression, clustering, and
time-series analysis, to name a few. The procedures can be graphically modelled
inside HANA in Flow-graphs.
R-Server
HANA has the ability to run R-Scripts on a
R-Server. The procedure is created and resides in SAP HANA, but the execution
is handled by an R-server, which is in a different physical location. The clear
upside here is that you're able to use a vast array of libraries
that exist in R. Also, many data scientists have extensive R knowledge and
you might already have programs written in R. The real downside here is that
you might not use HANA for the heavy lifting and performance can suffer.
The above solutions are all HANA centric. Obviously
Python, R, or other solutions can easily access data stored in HANA through an
ODBC connection, but in this case HANA is strictly a high performance database.
