It was developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand and is the companion software to the book "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques".

[1] Weka contains a collection of visualization tools and algorithms for data analysis and predictive modeling, together with graphical user interfaces for easy access to these functions.

[1] The original non-Java version of Weka was a Tcl/Tk front-end to (mostly third-party) modeling algorithms implemented in other programming languages, plus data preprocessing utilities in C, and a makefile-based system for running machine learning experiments.

This original version was primarily designed as a tool for analyzing data from agricultural domains,[2][3] but the more recent fully Java-based version (Weka 3), for which development started in 1997, is now used in many different application areas, in particular for educational purposes and research.

[5] Another important area that is currently not covered by the algorithms included in the Weka distribution is sequence modeling.