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"Hopefully not a trend of everything being subsumed by Tensorflow." Why?

• ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Probably because there is an unfortunate trend when Google enters a product category: Everything around it dies.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products Are you really saying those are all monopolies in their categories?
• hulistinist 9y ago
  I don't have anything against Tensorflow, but I've learned over the years that it's good to have competition in numerical libraries and software so there's replication of results. Try your analysis using one library, and corroborate it using another one. When a field is dependent on one major piece of software, it's more susceptible to bugs--a programming bug becomes a misguided line of research for a whole field. Edward has been a promising addition to the PPL landscape. I actually preferred using it with Theano when I used it but that was a year ago, and it seems to have been developing rapidly. I have mixed feelings about this announcement, although to be honest I don't totally even really understand all the implications of it. In some ways I'm not sure how much Edward incrementally adds above and beyond TF; it has occupied a niche between something like TF and Stan or PyMC which is fine enough but I've sometimes wondered if it was sustainable in the long run. I have appreciated it being around, though, and have hoped it would continue to develop.
  • wodenokoto 9y ago
    Who's the numpy competitor? Are we suffuring due to lack of one?
    • genericpseudo 9y ago
      PyTorch, Theano (rip), TensorFlow itself, Numba/Blaze?
    • dasmoth 9y ago
      Who's the numpy competitor? R? Eigen? Neanderthal? HMatrix? (Yes, none of these are exactly 1:1 equivalent with numpy, but there absolutely are options. And from my point of view, having some options which aren’t tied to Python is healthy).
      • dragandj 9y ago
        Thanks for mentioning Neanderthal! http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org http://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org http://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal http://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal It aims to have more features, and more speed than numpy, with Clojure, on the JVM + Nvidia + AMD + Intel. Also relevant here is Bayadera, Clojure/GPU Bayesian modeling lib for the JVM: http://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera http://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera
        • dasmoth 9y ago
          Thanks, I'd somehow missed Bayadera. Something else to take a good look at!
        • nextos 9y ago
          Bayadera looks very cool. Do you have any examples involving complex hierarchical models, and performance vs Stan or PyMC?
          • dragandj 9y ago
            Yes. See https://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera/tree/master/test/clojure/uncomplicate/bayadera/examples/dbda https://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera/tree/master/test/cl... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEOOYbscyTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEOOYbscyTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGxYfi3Vi3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGxYfi3Vi3s
  • cat199 9y ago
    > it's good to have competition in numerical libraries and software so there's replication of results. Try your analysis using one library, and corroborate it using another one. and then discover that they are all using netlib/lapack under the hood :b