linfa VS db-benchmark

I've been playing with data analytics and ml in rust for the last couple of weeks. A typical ML job requires transforming some data to feed the ml model to the then train the model. For ML I've been using linfa (https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa) which is surprisingly nice. I've been experimenting with ndarray and polars for data transformation (linfa uses ndarray) - from a UX standpoint. I'm pretty surprised by polars' performance (https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/), which sits on top of arrow2, and it's definitely a great candidate for OLAP tasks. But I couldn't find any comparison between ndarray and polars, has anyone had any meaningful experience with the two or/and can point me to a benchmark comparison?

The most comprehensive current view of the Rust machine learning ecosystem at the moment is probably at https://www.arewelearningyet.com/ (I sometimes help maintain this site)

Rust has a weird mix at the moment, and not one that's likely to significantly change within the next 12 months, at least. Certain tools are genuinely best-in-class, especially around simple operations on insane amounts of data. Rust kills it in that space due to its native speed and focus on concurrency.

There's also growing projects like Linfa [1]. that while not at the level of scikit-learn, have significantly increased their coverage on common data science/classical ML problems in the past couple years, along with improved tooling. The space does have a few pure-Rust projects coming down the pipeline around autodifferentiation, GPU compute, etc. that are likely to yield some really valuable results in deep learning, but that aren't quite available and will take some time to pick up some traction even once they're released. At the same time, areas like data visualization are unlikely to reach parity with something like matplotlib/pyplot in the near future.

Python is the de-facto standard, and will be for some time, but Rust's ability to build accessible high-level APIs on top of performant, language-native libraries is attracting some attention and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing ingress in the certain areas over the next few years, where instead of the Python/C++ combination, it's just Rust all the way down.

[1] https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa

take a look at https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa for machine learning related crates

Check out smartcore and linfa. At work I was badly in need of an NMF function similar to MATLAB's one these days but not enough time to write one myself. If you're good at math and machine learning, this sounds like a task you could try tackling.

For other algorithms, there is not yet a single library to rule them all (linfa might become that at some point) but searching for the algorithm you need on crate.io is likely to give you some results (obligatory plug to Friedrich, my gaussian process implementation).

To all folks in love with Rust programming language, **linfa** is a promising library to check out: a complete porting of the well known scikit-learn library, which enables common preprocessing tasks and classical ML algorithms such as clustering, linear learners, logistic regression, and decision trees as well as support vector machines and Bayesian algorithms such as Naive Bayes. We all know that Python has the 98% of the machine learning languages market share, but if I looked to something else, a super-fast Rust implementation would be my first stop.

for a start I will implement the TryFrom for Dataset under a feature flag. But to be really useful some of the algorithms have to start using something like DatasetBase here Records are currently bounded by an associated type for the element type, we would have to relax that too. Just read your blogpost on polars 👍

Real-world performance is complicated since data science covers a lot of use cases.

If you're just reading a small CSV to do analysis on it, then there will be no human-perceptible difference between Polars and Pandas. If you're reading a larger CSV with 100k rows, there still won't be much of a perceptible difference.

Per this (old) benchmark, there are differences once you get into 500MB+ territory: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

I do think it was important for duckdb to put out a new version of the results as the earlier version of that benchmark [1] went dormant with a very old version of duckdb with very bad performance, especially against polars.

[1] https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270638 :

> Apache Ballista and Polars do Apache Arrow and SIMD.

> The Polars homepage links to the "Database-like ops benchmark" of {Polars, data.table, DataFrames.jl, ClickHouse, cuDF, spark, (py)datatable, dplyr, pandas, dask, Arrow, DuckDB, Modin,} but not yet PostgresML? https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ *

LLM -> Vector database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_database

/? inurl:awesome site:github.com "vector database"

I agree with your conclusion but want to add that switching from Julia may not make sense either.

According to these benchmarks: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/, DF.jl is the fastest library for some things, data.table for others, polars for others. Which is fastest depends on the query and whether it takes advantage of the features/properties of each.

For what it's worth, data.table is my favourite to use and I believe it has the nicest ergonomics of the three I spoke about.

Same. Numba does wonders for me in most scenarios. Yesterday I've discovered pola-rs and looks like I will add it to the stack. It's API is similar to pandas. Have a look at the benchmarks of cuDF, spark, dask, pandas compared to it: Benchmarks

The syntax has similarities with dplyr in terms of the way you chain operations, and it’s around an order of magnitude faster than pandas and dplyr (there’s a nice benchmark here). It’s also more memory-efficient and can handle larger-than-memory datasets via streaming if needed.

If interested in benchmarks comparing different dataframe implementations, here is one:

https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

Bad examples. Both numpy and pandas are notoriously un-optimized packages, losing handily to pretty much all their competitors (R, Julia, kdb+, vaex, polars). See https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/ for a partial comparison.