Microsoft embraces open source by making one of its top ML-framework available on GitHub
The leading IT company, Microsoft announces that one of their top-tier cross-platform frameworks for for model based machine learning is now open to all world-widely.
“We’re extremely excited today to open source Infer.NET on GitHub under the permissive MIT license for free use in commercial applications.” Yordan Zaykov, Principal Research Software Engineering Lead at Microsoft, stated this in his official statement.
The research team of Microsoft at Cambridge, begin their journey of developing the framework back in 2004. Infer.NET initially was proposed as a research tool and in 2008 it was released for academic use. But gradually with the time, the framework evolved from research tool to machine learning engine in a number of Microsoft products in Office, Xbox and Azzure.
How Infer.NET is unique from other ML libraries?
“Infer.NET enables a model-based approach to machine learning. This lets you incorporate domain knowledge into your model. The framework can then build a bespoke machine learning algorithm directly from that model. This means that instead of having to map your problem onto a pre-existing learning algorithm that you’ve been given, Infer.NET actually constructs a learning algorithm for you, based on the model you’ve provided.” – as quoted in the official statement by Microsoft.
Infer.NET can come to use if you have extensive knowledge about the domain you are working in, or if knowing the system’s behaviour is important to you, or if you have a production system that should be informed about the new data arrival.
The Microsoft team is looking forward engaging with the open source community in enhancing and developing the framework better. Infer.Net will soon become the part of ML.NET- machine learning framework. Initially some steps has already been taken by the Microsoft team in integrating the Infer.NET with ML.NET.
You can know more about Infer.NET framework and its repository on GitHub. Framework supports for Windows, Linux and MacOS is provided through .NET Core.
