A new maintenance release, now at version 0.0.18, of the RVowpalWabbit
package arrived on CRAN. It improves several sprintf()
calls by changing them to snprintf() (though there is a
remaining one creeping in from a linked-to library).
As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into VowpalWabbit from R go check it out.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Almost to the week one year since the last maintenance release, we can announce another maintenance release, now at version 0.0.17, of the RVowpalWabbit package. The CRAN maintainers kindly and politly pointed out that I was (cough, cough) apparently the last maintainer who had packages that set StagedInstall: no. Guilty as charged.
RVowpalWabbit is one the two packages; the other one will hopefully follow ‘shortly’. And while I long suspected linking aspects to drive this (this is an old package, newer R packaging of the awesome VowpalWabbit is in rvw, I was plain wrong here. The cause was an absolute path to an included dataset, computed in an example, which then gets serialized. As Tomas Kalibera suggested, we can replace the constant with a function and all is well. So here is 0.0.17.
As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into VowpalWabbit from R go check it out.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit released brings us to version 0.0.16 on CRAN. This is last package for which configure.ac needed an update to current standards (see the updates of corels, RcppGSL, RQuantLib, and littler). The make matters more interesting we also had to address one UBSAN issue we could not reproduce locally (which, it turns out, was our fault because we had not rebuilt one package dependency under UBSAN). But Prof Ripley confirmed the issue as addressed so all is good for now.
As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit package update brought us to version 0.0.15 earlier today. We attempted to fix one compilation error on Solaris, and addressed a few SAN/UBSAN issues with the gcc build.
As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit package update brings us to version 0.0.14. This time CRAN asked us to replace the (long obsoleted C-library) function ftime(). Along the way, we also updated links in the DESCRIPTION file to the (spiffy!!) new vowpalwabbit.org website, updated Travis use and fine-tuned some autoconf code in configure.ac.
There is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out. It should go to CRAN “eventually” once we have better mechanisms to support external libraries.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Note: Crossposted by Ivan, James and myself.
Today Dirk Eddelbuettel, James Balamuta and Ivan Pavlov are happy to announce the first release of a reworked R interface to the Vowpal Wabbit machine learning system.
Started as a GSoC 2018 project, the new rvw package was built to give R users easier access to a variety of efficient machine learning algorithms. Key features that promote this idea and differentiate the new rvw from existing Vowpal Wabbit packages in R are:
data.frame converter covering different variations of Vowpal Wabbit input formatsBelow is a simple example of how to use the renewed rvw’s interface:
library(rvw)
library(mlbench) # for a dataset
# Basic data preparation
data("BreastCancer", package = "mlbench")
data_full <- BreastCancer
ind_train <- sample(1:nrow(data_full), 0.8*nrow(data_full))
data_full <- data_full[,-1]
data_full$Class <- ifelse(data_full$Class == "malignant", 1, -1)
data_train <- data_full[ind_train,]
data_test <- data_full[-ind_train,]
# Simple Vowpal Wabbit model for binary classification
vwmodel <- vwsetup(dir = "./",
model = "mdl.vw",
option = "binary")
# Training
vwtrain(vwmodel = test_vwmodel,
data = data_train,
passes = 10,
targets = "Class")
# And testing
vw_output <- vwtest(vwmodel = test_vwmodel, data = data_test)More information is available in the Introduction and Examples sections of the wiki.
The rvw links directly to libvw and so initially we offer a Docker container in order to ship the most up to date package with everything needed.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Another small RVowpalWabbit package update brings us version 0.0.13. And just like Rblpapi yesterday, we have a new RVowpalWabbit update to cope with staged installs which will be a new feature of R 3.6.0. No other changes were made No new code or features were added.
We should mention once more there is a newer, but not on CRAN, package rvw thanks to the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (who was mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out.
More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
And yet another boring little RVowpalWabbit package update, now to version 0.0.12, and still in response to the CRAN request of not writing files where we should not (as caught by new tests added by Kurt). I had misinterpreted one flag and actually instructed to examples and tests to write model files back to the installed directory. Oops. Now fixed. I also added a reusable script for such tests in the repo for everybody's perusal (but it will require Linux and bindfs).
No new code or features were added.
We should mention once more that is parallel work ongoing in a higher-level package interfacing the vw binary -- rvw -- as well as plan to redo this package via the external libraries. In that sounds interesting to you, please get in touch. I am also thinking that rvw extensions / work may make for a good GSoC 2018 project (and wrote up a short note). Again, if interested, please get in touch.
More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Another boring little RVowpalWabbit package update to version 0.0.11 came in response to another CRAN request: We were writing temporary output (a cache file for the fit/prediction, to be precise) to a non-temporary directory, which is now being caught by new tests added by Kurt. And as this is frowned upon, we made the requested change.
No new code or features were added.
We should mention once more that is parallel work ongoing in a higher-level package interfacing the vw binary -- rvw -- as well as plan to redo this package via the external libraries. In that sounds interesting to you, please get in touch. I am also thinking that rvw extensions / work may make for a good GSoC 2018 project. Again, if interested, please get in touch.
More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
A boring little RVowpalWabbit package update to version 0.0.10 came in response to another CRAN request: We were switching directories to run tests (or examples) which is now discouraged, so we no longer do this as it turns that we can of course refer to the files directly as well. Much cleaner.
No new code or features were added.
We should mention once more that is parallel work ongoing in a higher-level package interfacing the vw binary -- rvw -- as well as plan to redo this package via the external libraries. In that sounds interesting to you, please get in touch.
More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
The RVowpalWabbit package update is the third of four upgrades requested by CRAN, following RcppSMC 0.1.5 and RcppGSL 0.3.2.
This package being somewhat raw, the change was simple and just meant converting the single entry point to using Rcpp Attributes -- which addressed the original issue in passing.
No new code or features were added.
We should mention that is parallel work ongoing in a higher-level package interfacing the vw binary -- rvw -- as well as plan to redo this package via the external libraries. In that sounds interesting to you, please get in touch.
More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.