I agree. My experience has been that most machine learning tools help answer a question, but don't provide APIs and method to help you define the specific quest

I agree. My experience has been that most machine learning tools help answer a question, but don't provide APIs and method to help you define the specific question you want to solve. This is actually why I work on an open source library called Compose[0]. The goal of compose is to help people define prediction problems and extract training examples. By using a standardized API the tool can then automatically search the data for the training examples you can use for machine learning. We're still in the early days of developing this tool, but we hope to structure and standardize this earlier step of the machine learning process that is normally ignored. [0] https://github.com/FeatureLabs/compose https://github.com/FeatureLabs/compose