
Machine Learning for .NET - T-A
https://github.com/dotnet/machinelearning
======
zer0nes
FYI: this library has been in development for nearly a decade and is very
mature. It is as old as the likes of Scikit-Learn or Theano. It is, or at
least was, widely used within MS.

MS only decided to open source it recently.

Disclaimer: I was one of the early team members.

~~~
engrefoobiz
I spent a good couple of hours trying to get into machine learning, using
Microsoft.ML,from zero previous knowledge. I did the iris and sentiment
tutorial on Microsofts docs, but when I tried moving to my own (very simple)
dataset, I got exception after exception not understanding why. No one else
seem to have the problems (because it's so new - to the public) and the source
on github is apparently incomplete so I couldn't dig all the answers out
myself. It might be stable and mature but it's not a good entry point for
beginners imo.

------
Nelkins
Wonder what this offers over Accord.NET[0].

[0] [https://github.com/accord-net/framework/](https://github.com/accord-
net/framework/)

------
staticelf
Finally, Microsoft! I have always felt weird about Microsoft prioritizing
Python before their own language. Not that I do a lot of ML, but I plan to
maybe use it for some projects in the future and then it would feel nice to
have an official .NET package for it.

~~~
mistermann
Would be nice if they provided performant .Net wrappers around some of the
more popular open source ML libraries (pandas for example), assuming that is
technically possible.

~~~
sin7
What can pandas do that SQL can't?

~~~
mistermann
Pandas and SQL are cousins, at best.

Here's the 2,215 page user manual, to give you some idea of the power
contained within:

[https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-
docs/stable/pandas.pdf](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-
docs/stable/pandas.pdf)

They really serve two related but different purposes, I'm sure if you check it
out you will be impressed.

------
solomatov
It gets more and more interesting. First, swift for tensorflow, then ML.NET. I
like that ML is maturing and that we are getting statically typed tools.

------
polskibus
I wonder if R integration is coming in a sense that azure ml offers it - as
one of the building blocks.

~~~
gaius
Well you can use CNTK in R via Keras already, but only directly in Python I
think

------
gaius
What are the use cases for this versus CNTK (and vice versa)? Is there any
overlap?

------
megaman22
Very interesting. Nice to have another option available. I've dabbled with the
Stanford NLP libraries from .NET, but the GPL restriction makes it difficult
to actually use in production code.

[https://github.com/sergey-tihon/Stanford.NLP.NET](https://github.com/sergey-
tihon/Stanford.NLP.NET)

~~~
rahimnathwani
I'm curious to know why GPLv2 makes it difficult for your use-case. Are you
developing software that your clients install or host themselves?

~~~
megaman22
It's just very problematic to use anything GPL in commercial software,
compared to MIT or Apache licensed libaries.

~~~
rahimnathwani
I don't see anything problematic in GPLv2 if the software is running on your
own machines.

~~~
megaman22
That is the problem. We're selling a compiled product that is installed on
other people's machines. It's very complicated, and the guidance that I have
gotten from bosses and lawyers is stay away from GPL code.

