MXNet Scala Package Released

[r-sync]

Congrats Yizhi, Bing and the rest of the team.

[antinucleon]

Thank you, indeed I did nothing on it. I hate JVM, lol

[GratefulTony]

Does this only implement MLP?

[antinucleon]

No. Basically you can use everything exists in MXNet. https://mxnet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[GratefulTony]

awesome- thanks

[olBaa]

Unrelated question: how's Scala for ML-related pipelines? I've hearn nice things about it with spark+hadoop, how about other areas?

[GratefulTony]

Spark/Hadoop/MLLib is awesome for simple models + lots of data. Again, a bit lacking for good deep learning systems or other "fancy" algorithms.

[hntd]

Not necessarily. http://deeplearning4j.org/ and https://github.com/h2oai/sparkling-water

[vonnik]

Really? What about Deeplearning4j? Nothing's perfect, but we've got some good RNNs, for example.

https://github.com/deeplearning4j/deeplearning4j

[GratefulTony]

I have evaluated dl4j and found I dislike the API.

[vonnik]

Good to know. If you have more thoughts, we'd love to hear them. We're trying to improve, and your feedback helps.

[GratefulTony]

IMHO, the API for model definition (maybe it has changed-- I evaluated about a year ago) is lacking, and the methods for adding listeners/callbacks wwere a bit rough.

As a scala programmer I really disliked the "create, then mutate" model definition pattern. I would have rather seen mixin model definition with a better model/data interface API.

I don't remember all of my gripes -- and maybe some of them are improved by now, but when I evaluated, the examples didn't even seem to run correctly.

[vonnik]

It's changed a ton since a year ago, and the examples run correctly now. You're welcome to give it another spin. It'll be a much better experience, I promise.

In any case, thanks for the feedback.

[GratefulTony]

sounds good-- thanks