Unless you are highly proficient in Java, the coding itself is a big overhead. There’s no way around it, if you don’t know it already you are going to need to learn Java and it’s not a language that flows! For R users who are used to seeing their thoughts REALIZED immediately the endless declaration and INITIALIZATION of objects is going to seem like a DRAG. For that REASON I would recommend sticking with R for any kind of data exploration or prototyping and switching to Mahout as you get closer to production.

Unless you are highly proficient in Java, the coding itself is a big overhead. There’s no way around it, if you don’t know it already you are going to need to learn Java and it’s not a language that flows! For R users who are used to seeing their thoughts realized immediately the endless declaration and initialization of objects is going to seem like a drag. For that reason I would recommend sticking with R for any kind of data exploration or prototyping and switching to Mahout as you get closer to production.