Smile VS Tribuo

> I don't think it's right to recommend that new users move away from the package because of licensing issues

I was going to chime in to agree but then I saw how this was done - a completely innocuous looking commit:

https://github.com/haifengl/smile/commit/6f22097b233a3436519...

And literally no mention in the release notes:

https://github.com/haifengl/smile/releases/tag/v3.0.0

I think if you are going to change license especially in a way that makes it less permissive you need to be super open and clear about both the fact you are doing it and your reasons for that. This is done so silently as to look like it is intentionally trying to mislead and trick people.

So maybe I wouldn't say to move away because of the specific license, but it's legitimate to avoid something when it's so clearly driven by a single entity and that entity acts in a way that isn't trustworthy.

Check out Smile too.

Although it may be a bit more work, you can do both machine learning and AI in Java. If you are doing deep learning, you can use DeepJavaLibrary (I do work on this one at Amazon). If you are looking for other ML algorithms, I have seen Smile, Tribuo, or some around Spark.

For deploying a trained model there are a bunch of options that use Java on top of some native runtime like TF-Java (which I co-lead), ONNX Runtime, pytorch has inference for TorchScript models. Training deep learning models is harder, though you can do it for some of them in DJL. Training more standard ML models is much simpler, either via Tribuo, or using things like LibSVM & XGBoost directly, or other libraries like SMILE or WEKA.

I use smile https://github.com/haifengl/smile with ammonite and it feels pretty easy/good to work with. Of course for pure looking at data, and exploration, you're not going to beat python.

Actually, it does. Scala has Spark for data science and some ML libs like Smile.

I guess I must have a mistake somewhere. It's not much code. it's written in Kotlin with smile. My dataset is only about 32MB. I load the dataset into memory. I then use 80% of the data for training, and the other for later testing. I get just the columns I need and store them in the variable dataset.

I've heard good things about Smile, probably beats libs like Weka by far. I'm not sure if you can load a scikit-learn model though, so you might need to retrain the model in Kotlin.

I was using Smile for some period - https://haifengl.github.io/ - it's quite small and lightweight Java lib with some very basic algorithms - I was using in particularly cauterization. Along with this it provides Scala API.

It seems to have been picked up by Eclipse and there is also Oracle Labs' Tribuo and Deep Java Library. All seem active, but I don't know much about any of them. I agree it's probably best to follow the community and use a more popular tool like PyTorch.

We built model & data provenance into our open source ML library, though it's admittedly not the W3C PROV standard. There were a few gaps in it until we built an automated reproducibility system on top of it, but now it's pretty solid for all the algorithms we implement. Unfortunately some of the things we wrap (notably TensorFlow) aren't reproducible enough due to some unfixed bugs. There's an overview of the provenance system in this reprise of the JavaOne talk I gave here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOMjq2OS_c. The library is on GitHub - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.

Although it may be a bit more work, you can do both machine learning and AI in Java. If you are doing deep learning, you can use DeepJavaLibrary (I do work on this one at Amazon). If you are looking for other ML algorithms, I have seen Smile, Tribuo, or some around Spark.

We've been developing Tribuo on Github for two years now, MS are very actively developing ONNX Runtime (and the Java layer is fairly thin and wrapped over the same C API they use for node.js and C#), and things like XGBoost and LibSVM have been around for many years and the Java bits are developed in tree with the rest of the code so updated along with it. Amazon have a team of people working on DJL, though you'd have to ask them what their plans are.

FWIW, Oracle actually did release a Java ML library - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.

Tribuo (tribuo.org, github.com/oracle/tribuo). ONNX export support is there for 2 models at the moment in main, there's a PR for factorization machines which supports ONNX export, and we plan to add another couple of models and maybe ensembles before the upcoming release. Plus I need to write a tutorial on how it all works, but you can check the tests in the meantime.

You can do ML & data science in Java (full disclosure: I help run TensorFlow-Java, I maintain ONNX Runtime's Java interface, and I'm the lead developer on Oracle Labs' Java ML library Tribuo, so I'm pretty biased). It tends not to be as favoured in research, though I've published academic ML papers which used Java implementations. People do deploy ML models quite a bit in Java in industry.

It might be worth having a look at the ONNX Runtime Java API in addition to TF-Java, it'll let you deploy the rest of the HuggingFace pytorch models that don't have TF equivalents. I built the Java API a few years ago, and it's now a supported part of the ONNX Runtime project. We use it in Tribuo to provide one of our text feature embedding classes (BERTFeatureExtractor).

The IJava notebook kernel works pretty well for data science on top of Java. We use it in Tribuo to write all our tutorials, and if you've got the jar file in the right folder everything is runnable. For example, this is our intro classification tutorial - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo/blob/main/tutorials/irises-tribuo-v4.ipynb.