MLJ Introduction Lightning tour Key goals Key features Model composability Reporting problems Installation Learning Julia Learning to use MLJ Citing MLJ Getting Started Common MLJ Workflows Working with Categorical Data Model Search Loading Model Code Machines Evaluating Model Performance Performance Measures Tuning Models Learning Curves Transformers and other unsupervised models Composing Models Controlling Iterative Models Homogeneous Ensembles Generating Synthetic Data OpenML Integration Acceleration and Parallelism Simple User Defined Models Quick-Start Guide to Adding Models Adding Models for General Use Benchmarking Internals List of Supported Models Third Party Packages Glossary MLJ Cheatsheet FAQ Julia BlogPost Index of Methods Version A Machine Learning Framework for Julia
MLJ (Machine Learning in Julia) is a toolbox written in Julia providing a common interface and meta-algorithms for selecting, tuning, evaluating, composing and comparing over 150 machine learning models written in Julia and other languages. In particular MLJ wraps a large number of scikit-learn models.
MLJ is released under the MIT licensed and sponsored by the Alan Turing Institute.
For more elementary introductions to MLJ usage see Basic introductions below.
The first code snippet below creates a new Julia environment MLJ_tour and installs just those packages needed for the tour. See Installation for more on creating a Julia environment for use with MLJ.
Julia installation instructions are here.
using Pkg Pkg.activate("MLJ_tour", shared=true) Pkg.add("MLJ") Pkg.add("MLJIteration") Pkg.add("EvoTrees")
In MLJ a model is just a container for hyper-parameters, and that's all. Here we will apply several kinds of model composition before binding the resulting "meta-model" to data in a machine for evaluation using cross-validation.
Loading and instantiating a gradient tree-boosting model:
using MLJ Booster = @load EvoTreeRegressor # loads code defining a model type booster = Booster(max_depth=2) # specify hyper-parameter at construction booster.nrounds=50 # or mutate post facto
This model is an example of an iterative model. As is stands, the number of iterations nrounds is fixed.
Composition 1: Wrapping the model to make it "self-iterating"
Let's create a new model that automatically learns the number of iterations, using the NumberSinceBest(3) criterion, as applied to an out-of-sample l1 loss:
using MLJIteration iterated_booster = IteratedModel(model=booster, resampling=Holdout(fraction_train=0.8), controls=[Step(2), NumberSinceBest(3), NumberLimit(300)], measure=l1, retrain=true) Composition 2: Preprocess the input features
Combining the model with categorical feature encoding:
pipe = @pipeline ContinuousEncoder iterated_booster Composition 3: Wrapping the model to make it "self-tuning"
First, we define a hyper-parameter range for optimization of a (nested) hyper-parameter:
max_depth_range = range(pipe, :(deterministic_iterated_model.model.max_depth), lower = 1, upper = 10)
Now we can wrap the pipeline model in an optimization strategy to make it "self-tuning":
self_tuning_pipe = TunedModel(model=pipe, tuning=RandomSearch(), ranges = max_depth_range, resampling=CV(nfolds=3, rng=456), measure=l1, acceleration=CPUThreads(), n=50) Binding to data and evaluating performance
Loading a selection of features and labels from the Ames House Price dataset:
X, y = @load_reduced_ames;
Binding the "self-tuning" pipeline model to data in a machine (which will additionally store learned parameters):
mach = machine(self_tuning_pipe, X, y)
Evaluating the "self-tuning" pipeline model's performance using 5-fold cross-validation (implies multiple layers of nested resampling):
julia> evaluate!(mach, measures=[l1, l2], resampling=CV(nfolds=5, rng=123), acceleration=CPUThreads(), verbosity=2) ┌────────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ _.measure │ _.measurement │ _.per_fold │ ├────────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ LPLoss{Int64} @410 │ 16900.0 │ [17000.0, 16200.0, 16200.0, 16400.0, 18600.0] │ │ LPLoss{Int64} @632 │ 6.57e8 │ [6.38e8, 6.19e8, 5.92e8, 5.67e8, 8.7e8] │ └────────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────┘ _.per_observation = [[[20300.0, 21800.0, ..., 7910.0], [4300.0, 31900.0, ..., 12600.0], [22000.0, 91600.0, ..., 35500.0], [2980.0, 35700.0, ..., 6240.0], [9140.0, 30000.0, ..., 3050.0]], [[4.13e8, 4.74e8, ..., 6.26e7], [1.85e7, 1.02e9, ..., 1.59e8], [4.83e8, 8.38e9, ..., 1.26e9], [8.86e6, 1.28e9, ..., 3.89e7], [8.35e7, 9.01e8, ..., 9.31e6]]] _.fitted_params_per_fold = [ … ] _.report_per_fold = [ … ]
Try out MLJ yourself in the following batteries-included Binder notebook. No installation required.
Offer a consistent way to use, compose and tune machine learning models in Julia,
Promote the improvement of the Julia ML/Stats ecosystem by making it easier to use models from a wide range of packages,
Unlock performance gains by exploiting Julia's support for parallelism, automatic differentiation, GPU, optimization etc.
Data agnostic, train models on any data supported by the Tables.jl interface,
Extensive, state-of-the art, support for model composition (pipelines and learning networks) (see more below),
Convenient syntax to tune and evaluate (composite) models.
Consistent interface to handle probabilistic predictions.
Extensible tuning interface, to support growing number of optimization strategies, and designed to play well with model composition.
The generic model composition API's provided by other toolboxes we have surveyed share one or more of the following shortcomings, which do not exist in MLJ:
Composite models do not inherit all the behavior of ordinary models.
Composition is limited to linear (non-branching) pipelines.
Supervised components in a linear pipeline can only occur at the end of the pipeline.
Only static (unlearned) target transformations/inverse transformations are supported.
Hyper-parameters in homogeneous model ensembles cannot be coupled.
Model stacking, with out-of-sample predictions for base learners, cannot be implemented (using the generic API alone).
Hyper-parameters and/or learned parameters of component models are not easily inspected or manipulated (by tuning algorithms, for example)
Composite models cannot implement multiple operations, for example, both a predict and transform method (as in clustering models) or both a transform and inverse_transform method.
Some of these features are demonstrated in this notebook
For more information see the MLJ design paper or our detailed paper on the composition interface.
Users are encouraged to provide feedback on their experience using MLJ and to report issues. You can do so here or on the #mlj Julia slack channel.
For known issues that are not strictly MLJ bugs, see here
Initially it is recommended that MLJ and associated packages be installed in a new environment to avoid package conflicts. You can do this with
julia> using Pkg; Pkg.activate("my_MLJ_env", shared=true)
Installing MLJ is also done with the package manager:
julia> Pkg.add("MLJ")
Optional: To test your installation, run
julia> Pkg.test("MLJ")
It is important to note that MLJ is essentially a big wrapper providing unified access to model providing packages. For this reason, one generally needs to add further packages to your environment to make model-specific code available. This happens automatically when you use MLJ's interactive load command @iload, as in
julia> Tree = @iload DecisionTreeClassifier # load type julia> tree = Tree() # instance
where you will also be asked to choose a providing package, for more than one provide a DecisionTreeClassifier model. For more on identifying the name of an applicable model, see Model Search. For non-interactive loading of code (e.g., from a module or function) see Loading Model Code.
It is recommended that you start with models from more mature packages such as DecisionTree.jl, ScikitLearn.jl or XGBoost.jl.
MLJ is supported by a number of satellite packages (MLJTuning, MLJModelInterface, etc) which the general user is not required to install directly. Developers can learn more about these here
If you have experience in programming in another language but are new to Julia, then we highly recommend Aaron Christinson's tutorial Dispatching Design Patterns which is nicely compressed in his half-hour video presentation.
However, one doesn't need to be able to program in Julia to start using MLJ.
The present document, although littered with examples, is primarily intended as a complete reference. Resources for learning MLJ are:
the Getting Started section of this manual
an introductory binder notebook (no Julia/MLJ installation required)
the MLJ JuliaCon2020 Workshop materials and video recording
Data Science Tutorials in Julia
Users are also welcome to join the #mlj Julia slack channel to ask questions and make suggestions.
When presenting work that uses MLJ, please cite the MLJ design paper:
@article{Blaom2020, doi = {10.21105/joss.02704}, url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02704}, year = {2020}, publisher = {The Open Journal}, volume = {5}, number = {55}, pages = {2704}, author = {Anthony D. Blaom and Franz Kiraly and Thibaut Lienart and Yiannis Simillides and Diego Arenas and Sebastian J. Vollmer}, title = {{MLJ}: A Julia package for composable machine learning}, journal = {Journal of Open Source Software} }
If using the model composition features of MLJ (learning networks) please additionally cite
@misc{blaom2020flexible, title={{Flexible model composition in machine learning and its implementation in MLJ}}, author={Anthony D. Blaom and Sebastian J. Vollmer}, year={2020}, eprint={2012.15505}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.LG} }Getting Started »
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This document was generated with Documenter.jl on Wednesday 7 April 2021. Using Julia version 1.6.0.
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