The correct answer is: A. machine learning
Apache Mahout is a machine learning library for Apache Hadoop. It provides scalable implementations of common machine learning algorithms, such as classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. Mahout can be used to build machine learning models on large datasets, which can then be used to make predictions or recommendations.
Machine learning is a field of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. In other words, machine learning algorithms can learn from data and improve their performance over time without human intervention. Machine learning is used in a wide variety of applications, including spam filtering, web search, fraud detection, and product recommendations.
The other options are incorrect because they are not related to machine learning. Pattern recognition is a field of computer science that deals with the identification of patterns in data. Statistical classification is a field of statistics that deals with the classification of data into groups. Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that deals with the creation of intelligent agents, which are systems that can reason, learn, and act autonomously.