smc77 / rvw

Starting from the 'r.vw' R interface to Vowpal Wabbit

rvw

R interface to Vowpal Wabbit

What is Vowpal Wabbit?

Vowpal Wabbit is a fast on-line learner built by John Langford and others, initially at Yahoo! Research and now at Microsoft Research

What does rvw do?

This rvw package builds upon the skeleton r.vw package in the Vowpal Wabbit sources. It has streamlined the packaging and added a few things here and there.

Requirements

You will need the vw binary in your path. On Debian / Ubuntu systems to

sudo apt-get install vowpal-wabbiit

On other systems follow the Vowpal Wabbit instructions.

Examples

Several demos are included in the demo/ directory and accessible (once installed) via the demo() function. Here are tow figures from demo/vw_example_4.r which revisits the Titanic dataset.

Status

Still being worked on.

What about RVowpalWabbit ?

I will get to RVowpalWabbit which is now much easier given that a) Vowpal Wabbit itself now sports a sane build system and b) distributions contain a library for it. Consider rvw as a stepping stone.

Author

The r.vw package was written by Selim Raboudi.

rvw is being written by Dirk Eddelbuettel

License

r.vw is released under the ("revised" or "new" or "3-clause") BSD; the rvw package and its additions by Dirk Eddelbuettel are under the GPL (>= 2) just like R.