rust-ndarray VS neuronika

I would love some examples of how to do non-trivial data interop between Rust and Python. My experience is that PyO3/Maturin is excellent when converting between simple datatypes but conversions get difficult when there are non-standard types, e.g. Python Numpy arrays or Rust ndarrays or whatever other custom thing.

Polars seems to have a good model where it uses the Arrow in memory format, which has implementations in Python and Rust, and makes a lot of the ndarray stuff easier. However, if the Rust libraries are not written with Arrow first, they become quite hard to work with. For example, there are many libraries written with https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray, which is challenging to interop with Numpy.

(I am not an expert at all, please correct me if my characterizations are wrong!)

Sadly Ndarray does look a little abandoned to me: https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray

The date of the last commit of [ndarray](https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray) lies 6 month in the past while many recent issues are open and untouched.

Burn is different: it is built around the Backend trait which encapsulates tensor primitives. Even the reverse mode automatic differentiation is just a backend that wraps another one using the decorator pattern. The goal is to make it very easy to create optimized backends and support different devices and use cases. For now, there are only 3 backends: NdArray (https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray) for a pure rust solution, Tch (https://github.com/LaurentMazare/tch-rs) for an easy access to CUDA and cuDNN optimized operations and the ADBackendDecorator making any backend differentiable. I am now refactoring the internal backend API to make it as easy as possible to plug in new ones.

Looks like it's an open request

https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/281

Answer: you can’t with this crate. I implemented a dynamic n-dim solution myself but it uses views of integer indices that get copied to a new array, which have indexes to another flattened array in order to avoid duplication of possibly massive amounts of n-dimensional data; using the crate alone, copying all the array data would be unavoidable.

Ultimately I’ve had to make my own axis shifting and windowing mechanisms. But the crate is still a useful lib and continuing effort.

While I don’t mind getting into the weeds, these kinds of side efforts can really impact context focus so it’s just something to be aware of.

In principle you're trying to convert between columnar and row-based data layouts, something that happens fairly often in data science. I bet there's some hyper-efficient SIMD magic that could be invoked for these slicing operations (and maybe the iterator solution does exactly that). Might be worth taking a look at how the relevant Rust libraries like ndarray do it.

ndarray and numpy crates provide good way to operate on numpy ndarrays from python

I don't think any of the major ML projects have GPU acceleration because ndarray doesn't support it.

Not sure about ndarray: https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/840

Also perhaps comparing to Neuronika.

how does it compare with https://github.com/spearow/juice, https://github.com/neuronika/neuronika and https://github.com/spearow/juice?

Check where and how this struct is used. https://github.com/neuronika/neuronika/blob/variable-rework/neuronika-variable/src/history.rs

I have a question: as the maintainer of [neuronika](https://github.com/neuronika/neuronika), a crate that offers dynamic neural network and auto-differentiation with dynamic graphs, I'm looking at a future possible feature for such framework consisting in the possibility of compiling models, getting thus rid of the "dynamic" part, which is not always needed. This would speed the inference and training times quite a bit.

If you like autograd you will love neuronika

After reading most of the book, I wanted to get my hands dirty. My initial idea was to build a small machine learning framework but I deemed it to be too difficult if not impossible for me at the time. (Now, neuronika would have something to say). When gathering the bibliography for my thesis, I recalled to have stumbled upon a particular algorithm, t-SNE, whom I liked very much. I found the idea behind it to be very clever and elegant (t-SNE it's still one of my favorite algorithms, together with backprop and SOM, I find manifold learning fascinating in general). "So be it", I said, and I began writing a mess of a code, that was basically a translation of the C++ implementation. Boy was it bad.

me and a colleague of mine are developing neuronika