Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering advanced machine learning capabilities as a cloud-based service aimed at application developers.

The company says its Amazon Machine Learning engine is powered by the same technology used by its internal data scientist community to produce more than 50 billion predictions a week. The product aims to simplify the development process for software that can adapt to changing conditions, and make predictive analytics more accessible.

Amazon Machine Learning was launched at the AWS summit in San Francisco, where the company also announced AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps.

Beginners are welcome

Amazon says its machine learning tools can be used to detect fraudulent transactions, personalize online content and improve supply chain management, among other things.

The engine abstracts the complexity typically associated with machine learning projects and automates processes like data analysis and model training. There are visualizations and APIs to help beginners, and this being a cloud-based service, all of the infrastructure requirements are also taken care of by AWS.

The company claims that using the Amazon Machine Learning technology, a single Amazon developer was able in 20 minutes to solve a problem that had previously taken two developers 45 days.

“Amazon has a long legacy in machine learning. It powers the product recommendations customers receive on Amazon.com, it is what makes Amazon Echo able to respond to your voice, and it is what allows us to unload an entire truck full of products and make them available for purchase in as little as 30 minutes,” said Jeff Bilger, senior manager at Amazon Machine Learning.

“Early on, we recognized that the potential of machine learning could only be realized if we made it accessible to every developer across Amazon. Amazon Machine Learning is the result of everything we’ve learned in the process of enabling thousands of Amazon developers to quickly build models, experiment, and then scale to power planet-scale predictive applications.”

Amazon Machine Learning is available immediately on a pay-as-you-go basis. It integrates easily with other Amazon products, for example S3, Redshift and the Relational Database Service.