Microsoft Wants to Make Machine Learning Service Technology for Prediction

Microsoft unveils a new internet-based service that will help companies use data analysis to predict behavior, in a bid to gain more customers in the fast-growing field of machine learning.

The service would let users more easily build algorithms to perdict parchasing patterns, electricity usage and more. The work and results can be hosted on the Web through Microsoft's Azure cloud offering. Microsoft's new product dubbed Azure Machine Learning, has been in a trail period for a year and now has about 100 customers testing it.

Machine Learning is an artificial intiligence

field that involves constructing systems that automatically analyze and learn from data. It has been on the rise. Even as companies collect more information, the challange has been how to extract value from it. As a result, the market for analysis software is growing about 18% a year and will reach $6.5 billion by 2019, according to Transparency Market Research.