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[P] Haskell for managing experiments

While doing some experiments with machine learning, I have grown more and more tired of the prevalent ad hoc way of managing code. Always thousands of files containing parameters for trained models and predictions from different models and uncertainty of what code even generated them. A disaster for reproducibility. I have tried workflow managers like luigi, but they don’t precisely track which source code was used for generating a model. I also generally have an issue with how traditional git version control does not properly handle the machine learning workflow.

Proposed solutions to these kinds of problems seem to often lack a lot of flexibility and force you into ways of doing things with which you don’t necessarily agree with. The worst offenders are companies selling you their amazing cloud platform subscriptions that will do everything for you.

Frustrated with the current state of things, I have decided to take matters into my own hands. Building a deeply customizable tool that lets developers define how they want to do things appears to be a perfect job for Haskell, so I have started writing iterbuild. The idea is that you to write your python models and data manipulation functions like you always do in python(R could be implemented in the future) and then you reference and compose them inside Haskell. The Haskell program will then generate python glue code that composes the pieces as specified. It turns out that adding this new layer gives you the possibility to precisely control how you want to handle things like version control, model management, intermediate data caching, etc. inside Haskell and hiding the implementation details(Haskell excels at that). Don’t expect the project to be actually usable for real ml experiments right now, it is still more of an idea than a reality. I have written about my ideas concerning iterbuild in the readme of the project and I look forward to seeing whether anyone has his own thoughts on the matter.

submitted by /u/adri12_
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