river VS BanditPAM

River is a Python library for online machine learning. Online machine learning can dynamically adapt to new patterns in the data, or when the data itself is generated as a function of time, e.g., stock price prediction, content personalization.

Today, I'm going to take you on a thrilling coding adventure inspired by a LinkedIn code snippet, where I tangled with FastAPI, River, Watchdog, and Tenacity. Ready? Buckle up!

Complimentary: river and skorch

River - https://github.com/online-ml/river (Online machine learning, best used with Bytewax for Kafka integration)

Hey, great work. Do you think this algorithm would be amenable to be done online? I'm the author of River (https://riverml.xyz) where we're looking for good online clustering algorithms.

If you don't know Rust, but know Python, you can install Python libraries written in Rust with pip. Like, pip install polars or pip install robyn. In this case you follow the two bottom links. But then you don't write your own libraries and stuff so.. I guess that's not what you want.

But, if you want to learn Rust, you probably wouldn't start out with pyo3. You first install Rust with https://rustup.rs/ and then check out the official book, and the book rust by example, that you can find here https://www.rust-lang.org/learn - and maybe write some code on the Rust playground https://play.rust-lang.org/ - then, you use pyo3 to build Python libraries in Rust, and then use maturin https://www.maturin.rs/ to build and publish them to Pypi.

But if you still prefer to begin with Rust by writing Python libraries (it's a valid strategy if you are very comfortable with working with multiple stacks), the Maturin link has a tutorial that setups a program that is half written in python, half written in Rust, https://www.maturin.rs/tutorial.html (well the pyo3 link I sent also has one too. You should refer to the documentation of both, because you will use the two together)

After learning Rust, the next step is looking for libraries that you could leverage to make Python programs ultra fast. Here https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon is an obvious choice, see some examples from the Rust cookbook https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/concurrenc... - when you create a parallel iterator, it will distribute the processing to many threads (by default, one per core). The rust cookbook, by the way, is a nice reference to see the most used crates (Rust libraries) in the Rust ecosystem.

Anyway there are some posts about pyo3 on the web, like this blog post https://boring-guy.sh/posts/river-rust/ (note: it uses an outdated version of pyo3, and doesn't seem to use maturin which is a newer tool). This post was written by the developers of https://github.com/online-ml/river - another Python library written in Rust

Oh they definitely can be incrementally updated, there is just added complexity. Online learning has been used with more classical machine learning methods in real-time analytics for a while now. River is a library that handles that.

We have both bandits and FTRL implemented in River (https://riverml.xyz) if that helps.

Repo: https://github.com/motiwari/BanditPAM

It's written in C++ for speed, but callable from Python and R. It also supports parallelization and intelligent caching at no extra complexity to end users. Its interface also matches the sklearn.cluster.KMeans interface, so minimal changes are necessary to existing code. repo

Thanks for bug report and repro steps! I've filed this issue at https://github.com/motiwari/BanditPAM/issues/244 on our repo.

I suspect that this is because the scikit-learn implementation of KMeans subsamples the data and uses some highly-optimized data structures for larger datasets. I've asked the team to see how we can use some of those techniques in BanditPAM and will update the Github repo as we learn more and improve our implementation.

Want something better than k-means? I'm happy to announce our SOTA k-medoids algorithm from NeurIPS 2020, BanditPAM, is now publicly available! `pip install banditpam` or `install.packages("banditpam")` and you're good to go!

Unlike in k-means, the k-medoids problem requires cluster centers to be actual datapoints, which permits greater interpretability of your cluster centers. k-medoids also works better with arbitrary distance metrics, so your clustering can be more robust to outliers if you're using metrics like L1.

Despite these advantages, most people don't use k-medoids because prior algorithms were too slow. In our NeurIPS 2020 paper, BanditPAM, we sped up the best known algorithm from O(n^2) to O(nlogn).

We've released our implementation, which is pip- and CRAN-installable. It's written in C++ for speed, but callable from Python and R. It also supports parallelization and intelligent caching at no extra complexity to end users. Its interface also matches the sklearn.cluster.KMeans interface, so minimal changes are necessary to existing code.

Our previous announcement that went viral: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/motiwari_want-something-bette...

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/banditpam

CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/banditpam/index.html

Repo: https://github.com/motiwari/BanditPAM

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.06856

If you find our work valuable, please consider starring the repo or citing our work. These help us continue development on this project.

I'm Mo Tiwari (motiwari.com), a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University. A special thanks to my collaborators on this project, Martin Jinye Zhang, James Mayclin, Sebastian Thrun, Chris Piech, and Ilan Shomorony, as well as the author of the R package, Balasubramanian Narasimhan.

(This is my first time posting on HN; I've read the FAQ before posting, but please let me know if I broke any rules)