Weka (software)

Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (Weka),

developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, is free
Weka
software licensed under the GNU General Public License, and
the companion software to the book "Data Mining: Practical
Machine Learning Tools and Techniques".[1]

Description
Weka logo, featuring weka, a bird
Weka contains a collection of visualization tools and algorithms endemic to New Zealand
for data analysis and predictive modeling, together with
graphical user interfaces for easy access to these functions.[1]
The original non-Java version of Weka was a Tcl/Tk front-end
to (mostly third-party) modeling algorithms implemented in
other programming languages, plus data preprocessing utilities
in C, and a makefile-based system for running machine
learning experiments. This original version was primarily
designed as a tool for analyzing data from agricultural
domains,[2][3] but the more recent fully Java-based version
(Weka 3), for which development started in 1997, is now used Weka 3.5.5 Explorer window open with
in many different application areas, in particular for educational Iris UCI dataset
purposes and research. Advantages of Weka include: Developer(s) University of
Waikato
Free availability under the GNU General Public
License. Stable release 3.8.6 (stable) /
Portability, since it is fully implemented in the Java January 28, 2022
programming language and thus runs on almost any Preview release 3.9.6 /
modern computing platform. January 28, 2022
A comprehensive collection of data preprocessing
Repository git.cms.waikato.ac
and modeling techniques.
.nz/weka/weka (htt
Ease of use due to its graphical user interfaces.
ps://git.cms.waikat
Weka supports several standard data mining tasks, more o.ac.nz/weka/wek
specifically, data preprocessing, clustering, classification, a)
regression, visualization, and feature selection. Input to Weka is
Written in Java
expected to be formatted according the Attribute-Relational File
Format and with the filename bearing the .arff extension. All of Operating system Windows, macOS,
Weka's techniques are predicated on the assumption that the Linux
data is available as one flat file or relation, where each data Platform IA-32, x86-64,
point is described by a fixed number of attributes (normally, ARM_architecture;
numeric or nominal attributes, but some other attribute types are
Java SE
also supported). Weka provides access to SQL databases using
Java Database Connectivity and can process the result returned Type Machine learning
by a database query. Weka provides access to deep learning License GNU General
with Deeplearning4j.[4] It is not capable of multi-relational data Public License
mining, but there is separate software for converting a
collection of linked database tables into a single table that is Website www.cs.waikato
suitable for processing using Weka.[5] Another important area .ac.nz/~ml/weka
that is currently not covered by the algorithms included in the (https://www.cs.wa
Weka distribution is sequence modeling. ikato.ac.nz/~ml/we
ka)
Extension packages
In version 3.7.2, a package manager was added to allow the easier installation of extension packages.[6]
Some functionality that used to be included with Weka prior to this version has since been moved into such
extension packages, but this change also makes it easier for others to contribute extensions to Weka and to
maintain the software, as this modular architecture allows independent updates of the Weka core and
individual extensions.

History
In 1993, the University of Waikato in New Zealand began development of the original
version of Weka, which became a mix of Tcl/Tk, C, and makefiles.
In 1997, the decision was made to redevelop Weka from scratch in Java, including
implementations of modeling algorithms.[7]
In 2005, Weka received the SIGKDD Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Service
Award.[8][9]
In 2006, Pentaho Corporation acquired an exclusive licence to use Weka for business
intelligence.[10] It forms the data mining and predictive analytics component of the Pentaho
business intelligence suite. Pentaho has since been acquired by Hitachi Vantara, and Weka
now underpins the PMI (Plugin for Machine Intelligence) open source component.[11]

Related tools
Auto-WEKA is an automated machine learning system for Weka.[12]
Environment for DeveLoping KDD-Applications Supported by Index-Structures (ELKI) is a
similar project to Weka with a focus on cluster analysis, i.e., unsupervised methods.
H2O.ai is an open-source data science and machine learning platform
KNIME is a machine learning and data mining software implemented in Java.
Massive Online Analysis (MOA) is an open-source project for large scale mining of data
streams, also developed at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
Neural Designer is a data mining software based on deep learning techniques written in
C++.
Orange is a similar open-source project for data mining, machine learning and visualization
based on scikit-learn.
RapidMiner is a commercial machine learning framework implemented in Java which
integrates Weka.
scikit-learn is a popular machine learning library in Python.

See also
Free and open-
source software
portal
 List of numerical-analysis software

References
1. Witten, Ian H.; Frank, Eibe; Hall, Mark A.; Pal, Christopher J. (2011). "Data Mining: Practical
machine learning tools and techniques, 3rd Edition" (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/
book.html). Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (CA). Retrieved 2011-01-19.
2. Holmes, Geoffrey; Donkin, Andrew; Witten, Ian H. (1994). "Weka: A machine learning
workbench" (https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/publications/1994/Holmes-ANZIIS-WEKA.pd
f) (PDF). Proceedings of the Second Australia and New Zealand Conference on Intelligent
Information Systems, Brisbane, Australia. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
3. Garner, Stephen R.; Cunningham, Sally Jo; Holmes, Geoffrey; Nevill-Manning, Craig G.;
Witten, Ian H. (1995). "Applying a machine learning workbench: Experience with agricultural
databases" (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/publications/1995/Garner95-imlc95.pdf) (PDF).
Proceedings of the Machine Learning in Practice Workshop, Machine Learning Conference,
Tahoe City (CA), USA. pp. 14–21. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
4. "Weka Package Metadata" (https://weka.sourceforge.net/packageMetaData/). SourceForge.
2017. Retrieved 2017-11-11.
5. Reutemann, Peter; Pfahringer, Bernhard; Frank, Eibe (2004). "Proper: A Toolbox for
Learning from Relational Data with Propositional and Multi-Instance Learners". 17th
Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI2004). Springer-Verlag.
CiteSeerX 10.1.1.459.8443 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.459.
8443).
6. "weka-wiki - Packages" (https://waikato.github.io/weka-wiki/packages/). Retrieved
27 January 2020.
7. Witten, Ian H.; Frank, Eibe; Trigg, Len; Hall, Mark A.; Holmes, Geoffrey; Cunningham, Sally
Jo (1999). "Weka: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java
Implementations" (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/publications/1999/99IHW-EF-LT-MH-GH-
SJC-Tools-Java.pdf) (PDF). Proceedings of the ICONIP/ANZIIS/ANNES'99 Workshop on
Emerging Knowledge Engineering and Connectionist-Based Information Systems. pp. 192–
196. Retrieved 2007-06-26.
8. Piatetsky-Shapiro, Gregory I. (2005-06-28). "KDnuggets news on SIGKDD Service Award
2005" (http://www.kdnuggets.com/news/2005/n13/2i.html). Retrieved 2007-06-25.
9. "Overview of SIGKDD Service Award winners" (http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigkdd/awards_serv
ice.php). 2005. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
10. "Pentaho Acquires Weka Project" (http://www.pentaho.com/pentaho-acquires-weka-project).
Pentaho. Retrieved 2018-02-06.
11. "Plugin for Machine Intelligence" (https://community.hitachivantara.com/s/article/machine-int
elligence-made-easy).
12. Thornton, Chris; Hutter, Frank; Hoos, Holger H.; Leyton-Brown, Kevin (2013). Auto-WEKA:
Combined Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization of Classification Algorithms (https://d
l.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2487629). KDD '13 Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD
international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. pp. 847–855.

External links
Official website (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka) at University of Waikato in New
Zealand
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