Has anyone here been using the Google Prediction API? For what? Did it "work"?
2 Answers
If you're looking for a real-world case check out this one which automatically assigns priority to bugs.
I've also created a couple test projects to get a feel for how I might use it in production.
One of them suggests tags for Stackoverflow questions. The model for this was trained with questions (from the data dump) that only had 1 tag. This helps it recognize particulars of a specific tag. Code and prose were split into separate features, as one of them may have greater impact on the result. When given a question, it returns the top 10 tag suggestions; actual tags are included for comparison.
Structure was a CSV file:
"tag","code blocks(200 chars)","body text(200 chars)"
Some characters were filtered out of code
that caused training errors: []^|~
. Not sure which of those was causing problems.
If you'd like to see a certain question added to the test list, let me know. Obviously, questions that have code predict better.
The other project predicts movie ratings based on IMDB data and director/actors. Unlike the tag suggester, this one is live so you can experiment with different combinations to see what it would predict.
Structure here was:
rating,"directorId","actorId actorId actorId"
Both are running on Google App Engine so python is the back end. I'm not using a particular API; just followed some of Nick Johnson's example code.

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Awesome! Exactly what I wanted to see! – user94154 Jan 31 '11 at 15:45
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4Unfortunately the links in the answer are no longer online. Anyone have some updated examples? – Herman Schaaf Jan 16 '13 at 09:04
I have not used this API. But their website lists the below usecases
- Recommendation systems (demo code)
- Spam detection (demo code)
- Customer sentiment analysis
- Upsell opportunity analysis
- Message routing decisions
- Diagnostics
- Document and email classification
- Suspicious activity identification
- Churn analysis
- Language identification

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Thanks for the response, but I'm mostly interested in what non-Googlers have used it for/how they did it (ie, which language/library, how they handled data collection, how they structured the data etc). – user94154 Jan 16 '11 at 19:45