About Weka I can say it is quite user friendly, its GUI provides both

1) an interactive mode (Explorer) where you load a dataset and then you can test different pre-processing and learning algorithms

2) a workflow mode (Knowledge Flow) where you first define a pipeline of operations and then execute them as a whole

There is a wide choice of mining algorithms which you can use in both modes.

Usage through GUI is not generally meant for big data, but you may be able to handle large datasets using the command-line interface or the Java API.

I know Orange far less: AFAIK it only provides the workflow mode, but shouldn't be difficult to use and is a more modern app. I don't know how well it handles big data.

Are these your only two choices? I understand that Weka is a little outdated, though I've never used it. KNIME is free and is maintained by the open source community. There are several other open source and commercial options. Why are you forced to choose between Weka and Orange?

@Roberto Pasolini

Thanks for your informative answer

Regards

@Julian Hatwell

My last line in the question was

"And of you have a better app.. suggest it"

But Usually in teaching academic corses.. we head for the well known, reputitional and classics apps

@Jesús S. Aguilar-Ruiz

Thanks prof for your sharp detailed answer, really appreciate it

I have used weka several times and I think that it is user friendly and can manage large data easily.

@Saeed Samadianfard

Thanks for participating in the discussion.. im sure your right

You're welcome.

WEKA improved a lot. They incorporated even big data handling. Ready to use by avoiding coding.

@swarup roy

Thanks for that information, may i ask wich version are you referring?

Is it free?

How about trying SAS Enterprise Miner, the Academic on Demand version, which is free for teachers and researchers. It has the same features as the full version, so it has numerous robust machine learning algorithms. In addition, it is user friendly and easy to use.

Dothang

@Dothang troung

Thanks a lot for your contribution

Weka is good if you can use Java to develop the system for your work.

For big data, I recommend the R language and SAS. They have effective implementation for managing big data sets.

@yu-da-kin

Thanks to the valuable answer