[erlang-questions] Machine Learning

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Samuel <samuelrivas@REDACTED> wrote:

> I am not aware of existing ML or linear algrebra libraries in erlang
> that can be used to quick start an ML project, but just piping into
> tensorflow (or any other existing library/framework) isn't really
> doing ML with erlang, is it? You can as well just use tensorflow
> directly.
>

The question is if this is a practical problem which needs solving or it is
for research. If you are researching how to construct, say, SVM or NNs,
then surely Erlang is a good vehicle. But in practice, there is a number of
things which makes Erlang unsuitable:

* ML is often CPU bound. You don't want a bytecode interpreter to be a
limiting factor here. Even if the interpreter in Erlang is state-of-the-art
and highly optimized, it is not far fetched that a FP-intensive program
will be roughly a factor of 30 faster if compiled in a lower level language.

* GPUs are popular in ML models for a reason: they speed up the FP
computations by a factor of 3000 or more. This in itself should hint you
that you need something else than Erlang.

* Erlangs word overhead per process and terms means a lower-level model can
pack many more entities in memory. This affects caching behavior.

Training of the model is often off-line and using the model is online in
the system. How you train your model is less important. This is why I'd
just outsource this problem to the libraries built and tuned for it. It is
like solving LinAlg problems but forgetting everything about existing
LAPACK and ATLAS routines in Fortran.

A model, in Erlang, which could be viable is to use Erlang to produce
programs for lower level consumption by compilation. But these are problems
for which languages such as Haskell and OCaml dominates for a reason: their
type systems makes it far easier to pull off.



-- 
J.
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