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A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

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Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#11

Post by zeec123 »

rjdagost wrote: post #10
zeec123 wrote: post #5

Unfortunately scikit-learn is a mess without an alternative. There is so much wrong with the api design of sklearn (how can one think "predict_proba" is a good function name?). I can understand this, since most of it was probably written by PhD students without the time and expertise to come up with a proper api; many of them without a CS background. Compare this to e.g. the API of google/guava. For example https://w…

scikit-learn does have its share of inconsistencies and strange omissions, but I have found it to be much, much easier to use than the alternatives.

Ease of use might be the criteria when you are a student. However as soon as you start to depend on it for a living you realise that scikit-learn made enough serious mistakes such to have lost my trust in it and I am forced to pay the ~$15.000 for matlab until some alternative is available.

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#12

Post by hetspookjee »

zeec123 wrote: post #11
rjdagost wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scikit-learn does have its share of inconsistencies and strange omissions, but I have found it to be much, much easier to use than the alternatives.

Ease of use might be the criteria when you are a student. However as soon as you start to depend on it for a living you realise that scikit-learn made enough serious mistakes such to have lost my trust in it and I am forced to pay the ~$15.000 for matlab until some alternative is available.

I was not aware of the links you shared pointing out the inconsistencies. I wonder how the authors themselves respond about these reddit posts (if at all?). Thank you for sharing!

Despite that, it does have some implementations that made it stick out for me across all other languages, such as the fit / transform / predict API spread across the library, and the useage of joblib as back-end for speedup - this allows their models to be easily scaleable on clusters with the use of Dask.

I still have confidence that their most used functions (e.g. RandomForest) and models are still correctly implemented and provide great value in that regard.

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#14

Post by globberz »

pyrale wrote: post #4
xvilka wrote: post #3

I thought INRIA uses OCaml everywhere and would choose Owl[1] (OCaml library for numeric scientific computing and machine learning) as a project for this kind of foundation. [1] https://github.com/owlbarn/owl

Inria is a public institution dedicated to research. There are many labs and people with separate goals. They are no more dedicated to ocaml than MIT is dedicated to emacs.

An even better comparison would be with, say, the NSF. I am sure that this or that technology has been developed by NSF-funded researchers, but it would be absurd to assume that NSF-funded researchers in MIT use and promote the same things as NSF-funded researchers in Caltech because they're both affiliated with the NSF.

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#15

Post by rjdagost »

zeec123 wrote: post #11
rjdagost wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scikit-learn does have its share of inconsistencies and strange omissions, but I have found it to be much, much easier to use than the alternatives.

Ease of use might be the criteria when you are a student. However as soon as you start to depend on it for a living you realise that scikit-learn made enough serious mistakes such to have lost my trust in it and I am forced to pay the ~$15.000 for matlab until some alternative is available.

Often I will do some prototyping with scikit-learn and then write my own implementation in numpy / scipy for something that goes into production. But I have used scikit-learn in production as well without issue. I have used MATLAB a bit and it is quite nice for figuring things out / prototyping. But the issue I have with it is that it's not typically intended for production software. So then you often need to reimplement your MATLAB code in whatever "platform" language you're using. That's why I've largely transitioned away from MATLAB.

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#16

Post by neuromantik8086 »

zeec123 wrote: post #5

Unfortunately scikit-learn is a mess without an alternative. There is so much wrong with the api design of sklearn (how can one think "predict_proba" is a good function name?). I can understand this, since most of it was probably written by PhD students without the time and expertise to come up with a proper api; many of them without a CS background. Compare this to e.g. the API of google/guava. For example https://w…

> I can understand this, since most of it was probably written by PhD students; ... many of them without a CS background.

Of the top 4 contributors to scikit-learn, 3 have computer science graduate degrees and 1 has a degree in physics, so I'm not sure that the lack of a "CS background" is the root cause of the majority of the problems with the codebase (perceived or actual).

It may more be related to the nature of academic code in general, since most of it is supposed to be more proof-of-concept rather than general use worthy (e.g., why Google's original code was refactored by Jeff Dean).

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#17

Post by bob_bob_bob »

zeec123 wrote: post #5

Unfortunately scikit-learn is a mess without an alternative. There is so much wrong with the api design of sklearn (how can one think "predict_proba" is a good function name?). I can understand this, since most of it was probably written by PhD students without the time and expertise to come up with a proper api; many of them without a CS background. Compare this to e.g. the API of google/guava. For example https://w…

It's true that scikit-learn was started and originally written mostly by PhD students (most were in fact CS PhDs), and the API they designed is amazing! A lot of the python ML ecosystem has adopted it and uses it - fit, predict, transform. I don't think any language has something comparable.

4 years ago they removed a misleading class - and even at the time the documentation was clear about what it was doing. I'm not sure how this reveals some huge flaw about scikit-learn. At best it shows that the contributors can realize their mistakes and solve them, without even needing people to point it out? That's great!

Also pointing to a bad implementation 4 years ago, for a project which has since then had way more funding for engineering time, and who's use has exploded, seems a bit misleading.

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#18

Post by notafraudster »

zeec123 wrote: post #5

Unfortunately scikit-learn is a mess without an alternative. There is so much wrong with the api design of sklearn (how can one think "predict_proba" is a good function name?). I can understand this, since most of it was probably written by PhD students without the time and expertise to come up with a proper api; many of them without a CS background. Compare this to e.g. the API of google/guava. For example https://w…

TBF, the major alternative to scikit-learn, doing it in R, would have you doing model Granted I still use R for ML stuff, and I concede that silently regularizing regressions, and only being able to avoid doing so by hacking the penalty parameter, is terrifying.

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#19

Post by black_puppydog »

xvilka wrote: post #3

I thought INRIA uses OCaml everywhere and would choose Owl[1] (OCaml library for numeric scientific computing and machine learning) as a project for this kind of foundation. [1] https://github.com/owlbarn/owl

I personally only know one team in our building here that uses Coq (written in OCaml) and all the rest use (depending on their field) C/C++ (robotics/ROS), Matlab, python (tensorflow/pytorch/sklearn,...)

Then again, it's not like I know the whole building, let alone the other parts of Inria ...

Re: A foundation for scikit-learn at Inria

#20

Post by zeec123 »

bob_bob_bob wrote: post #17
zeec123 wrote: post #5

Unfortunately scikit-learn is a mess without an alternative. There is so much wrong with the api design of sklearn (how can one think "predict_proba" is a good function name?). I can understand this, since most of it was probably written by PhD students without the time and expertise to come up with a proper api; many of them without a CS background. Compare this to e.g. the API of google/guava. For example https://w…

It's true that scikit-learn was started and originally written mostly by PhD students (most were in fact CS PhDs), and the API they designed is amazing! A lot of the python ML ecosystem has adopted it and uses it - fit, predict, transform. I don't think any language has something comparable. 4 years ago they removed a misleading class - and even at the time the documentation was clear about what it was doing. I'm not…

See the second link I posted. Even the most basic 3 functionalities are bad designed. If X is your input space and Y your output space then fit should (after each call) return a function X->Y and not modify some internal state.

Have you ever tried looked at the pipeline cross validation, where you have to pass a dict of parameters to the function with underscore prefixes for each stage in the pipeline? Do this and you never call the API design amazing again.

There are examples for other bad design choices as well.

You are right, there is no alternative at the moment. Maybe julia lang will do better job, we will see.

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