Designing and building the mlpack open-source machine learning library

TL;DR

mlpack is a fast, flexible, open-source C++ library that implements a wide range of machine learning algorithms, from traditional to cutting-edge techniques, supported by an active global community.

Contribution

This paper introduces mlpack, highlighting its design, extensive algorithm implementations, performance benchmarks, and community-driven development approach.

Findings

mlpack outperforms other libraries in speed benchmarks.

It covers a broad spectrum of algorithms, including recent cutting-edge techniques.

The library has an active, international contributor community.

Abstract

mlpack is an open-source C++ machine learning library with an emphasis on speed and flexibility. Since its original inception in 2007, it has grown to be a large project implementing a wide variety of machine learning algorithms, from standard techniques such as decision trees and logistic regression to modern techniques such as deep neural networks as well as other recently-published cutting-edge techniques not found in any other library. mlpack is quite fast, with benchmarks showing mlpack outperforming other libraries' implementations of the same methods. mlpack has an active community, with contributors from around the world---including some from PUST. This short paper describes the goals and design of mlpack, discusses how the open-source community functions, and shows an example usage of mlpack for a simple data science problem.