mpctools

A set of python tools for extending standard (and non-standard) libraries. These originated from my own needs and those of my students, and I decided to put them here in case they may be useful to other people.

Features

The library currently contains the following two packages:

1. extensions: A number of extensions to numpy, sklearn, pandas and matplotlib, as well as general-purpose utilities.
2. parallel: A set of tools for wrapping pathos multiprocessing in a simple easy to use interface with multiple parallel workers.

More details for each library are provided as doxygen-style comments in the modules.

Setting up

Requirements

This Library has the following dependencies:

• opencv-python
• scikit-learn
• matplotlib
• deprecated
• lapsolver
• hotelling
• seaborn
• pandas
• pathos
• scipy
• numpy
• numba

In most cases, the above can be automatically installed through the library itself (i.e. pip will attempt to download them). If this causes issues, or you wish to install specific versions (such as building opencv from source), you can prevent dependency checking by passing the --no-deps flag.

Installing

The project is available on PyPi, and hence the latest (stable) release can be installed simply:

pip install mpctools [--no-deps]

Note that the --no-deps flag is optional (as described above).

Alternatively, you may choose to install directly from source. This has the added advantage that if you change any of the implementations, the changes will be reflected without having to rebuild. However, you will have to manually download the source (via git or just zipped and then extracted):

python setup.py build develop [--no-deps]

Known Issues

• Python 3.7: parallel.IWorker - There seems to be an incompatibility in pathos with python 3.7, which is causing it to default to pickle rather than dill, and sometimes preventing abc-derived classes (namely the IWorker instance) from being pickled. If this happens to you, just make your worker a standard class and copy the initialiser and update_progress methods from IWorker. We are working on a solution to this.
• parallel Blocking - If the program seems to hang for no reason, it could be that one of the child processes died maybe due to a memory overlow... if this happens, try to limit the amount of memory usage by each IWorker.