Back to the docs page

Previous      Next

Overview of Waffles

This document provides a high-level overview of what is contained in the Waffles machine learning toolkit.

Waffles provides the following command-line applications, each containing several tools for performing machine learning operations:

  • waffles_audio contains tools for processing audio files.
  • waffles_cluster contains tools for clustering.
  • waffles_dimred contains tools for dimensionality reduction, attribute selection, etc.
  • waffles_generate contains tools to sample distributions, sample manifolds, and generate certain types of data.
  • waffles_learn contains tools for supervised learning.
  • waffles_plot contains tools for visualizing data.
  • waffles_recommend contains tools for collaborative filtering, recommendation systems, imputation, etc.
  • waffles_sparse contains tools to learning from sparse data, document classification, etc.
  • waffles_transform contains tools for manipulating data, shuffling rows, swapping columns, matrix operations, etc.

For people who prefer not to have to remember commands, waffles also includes a graphical tool called

  • waffles_wizard
. This application opens a web browser and guides the user through a series of forms to create a command that will perform the desired task. This provides all the convenience of a GUI interface, but without locking the user in. That is, since it generates a command-line command for you to use, it becomes easy to perform the same operations without the GUI. Thus, the Waffles tools are particularly well-suited for experiments that need to be automated.

All of the functionality of the waffles tools is provided in an object-oriented C++ class library called

  • GClasses
. In other words, the command-line tools are just thin wrappers around functionality implemented in the GClasses library. Thus, if you find any of the operations performed by the Waffles command-line tools to be useful, it is easy to incorporate the same functionality into your C++ programs.

Finally, in order to fully demonstrate how to use the GClasses library, several demo applications are also included with Waffles.


Previous      Next

Back to the docs page