Infer.NET is a framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models. It can also be used for probabilistic programming.

One can use Infer.NET to solve many different kinds of machine learning problems - from standard problems like classification, recommendation or clustering through to customised solutions to domain-specific problems.

Infer.NET has been used in a wide variety of domains including information retrieval, bioinformatics, epidemiology, vision, and many others.

Contents

• Structure of repository
• Build and test
  • Windows
  • Linux

Structure of repository

• The Visual Studio solution Infer2.sln in the root of the repository contains all Infer.NET components, unit tests and sample programs from the folders described below.

• src/

  • Compiler contains the Infer.NET Compiler project which takes model descriptions written using the Infer.NET API, and converts them into inference code. The project also contains utility methods for visualization of the generated code.

  • Csoft is an experimental feature that allows to express probabilistic models in a subset of the C# language. You can find many unit tests of Csoft models in the Tests project marked with Category: CsoftModel trait.

  • Examples contains C# projects that illustrate how to use Infer.NET to solve a variety of different problems.

    • ClickThroughModel - a web search example of converting a sequence of clicks by the user into inferences about the relevance of documents.

    • ClinicalTrial - the clinical trial tutorial example with an interactive user interface.`

    • InferNET101 - samples from Infer.NET 101 introduction to the basics of Microsoft Infer.NET programming.

    • ImageClassifier - an image search example of classifying tagged images.

    • LDA - this example provides Infer.NET implementations of the popular LDA model for topic modeling. The implementations pay special attention to scalability with respect to vocabulary size, and with respect to the number of documents. As such, they provide good examples for how to scale Infer.NET models in general.

    • MontyHall - an Infer.NET implementation of the Monty Hall problem, along with a graphical user interface.

  • FSharpWrapper is a wrapper project that hides some of the generic constructs in the Infer.NET API allowing simpler calls to the Infer.NET API from standard F#.

  • IronPythonWrapper contains wrapper for calling Infer.NET from the IronPython programming language and tests for the wrapper. Please refer to README.md for more information.

  • Learners folder contains Visual Studio projects for complete machine learning applications including classification and recommendation. You can read more about Learners here.

  • Runtime - is a C# project with classes and methods needed to execute the inference code.

  • Tutorials contains Examples Browser project with simple examples that provide a step-by-step introduction to Infer.NET.

• test/

  • TestApp contains C# console application for quick invocation and debugging of variouse Infer.NET components.

  • TestFSharp is an F# console project for smoke testing of Infer.NET F# wrapper.

  • TestPublic contains scenario tests for tutorial code. These tests are a part of the PR and nightly builds.

  • Tests - main unit test project containing thousands of tests. These tests are a part of the PR and nightly builds. The folder Tests\Vibes contains MATLab scripts that compare Infer.NET to the VIBES package. Running them requires Vibes2_0.jar (can be obtained on the VIBES website) to be present in the same folder.

  • Learners folder contains the unit tests and the test application for Learners (see above).

• docs folder contains the scripts for bulding API documentation and for updating https://microsoft.github.io/Infer.NET. Please refer to README.md for more details.

Build and Test

Infer.NET is cross platform and supports .NET Framework 4.5.2 and Mono 5.0. Unit tests are written using the XUnit framework.

Windows

Prerequisites

Visual Studio 2017. If you don't have Visual Studio 2017, you can install the free Visual Studio 2015/2017 Community.

Build and test

You can load Infer2.sln solution located in the root of repository into Visual Studio and build all libraries and samples.

NB! The solution has a number of build configurations that allows building either for all supported frameworks simultaneously or only for a specific one, but in order for Visual Studio to behave correctly, the solution needs to be closed and re-opened after switching between such configurations.

Unit tests are available in Test Explorer window. Normally you should see tests from 3 projects: Tests, PublicTests and LearnersTest. Note, that some of the tests are categorized, and those falling in the OpenBug or BadTest categories are not supposed to succeed.

Linux

Almost all components of Infer.NET run on Mono and/or .net core 2.0 except some visualizations in Compiler project and sample applications that use WPF.

Prerequisites

1. Mono and MSBuild (version 5.0 and higher)
2. .NET Core 2.0 SDK
3. NuGet package manager

Build

1. Restore required NuGet packages after cloning the repository. Execute the following command in the root directory of the repository:

   msbuild /p:MonoSupport=true /restore Infer2.sln
   

2. Then build the entire solution (or individual projects) using the following commands:

   msbuild /p:MonoSupport=true Infer2.sln
   

   or

   msbuild /p:MonoSupport=true src/Runtime/Runtime.csproj
   

   These commands set the MonoSupport property to true. It excludes code that uses WPF from build.

Run unit tests

In order to run unit tests, build the test project and execute one of the following commands:

mono ~/.nuget/packages/xunit.runner.console/2.3.1/tools/net452/xunit.console.exe <path to net452 assembly with tests> <filter>

dotnet ~/.nuget/packages/xunit.runner.console/2.3.1/tools/netcoreapp2.0/xunit.console.dll <path to netcoreapp2.0 assembly with tests> <filter>

There are three test assemblies in the solution:

• Infer.Tests.dll in the folder test/Tests.
• TestPublic.dll in the folder test/TestPublic.
• Infer.Learners.Tests.dll in the folder test/Learners/LearnersTests.

Depending on the build configuration, the assemblies will be located in the bin/Debug or bin/Release subdirectories of the test project.

<filter> is a rule to chose what tests will be run. You can specify them using -trait Category=<category> and -notrait Category=<category> parts of <filter>. The former selects tests of the given category, while the latter selects test that don't belong to the given category. These can be combined: several -trait options mean that at least one of the listed traits has to be present, while several -notrait options mean that none of such traits can be present on the filtered tests.

Runner executes tests in parallel by default. However, some test category must be run sequentially. Such categories are:

• Performance
• DistributedTest
• CsoftModel
• ModifiesGlobals

Add the -parallel none argument to run them.

CompilerOptionsTest is a category for long running tests, so, for quick testing you must filter these out by -notrait. BadTest is a category of tests that must fail. OpenBug is a category of tests that can fail.

An example of quick testing of Infer.Tests.dll in Debug configuration after changing working directory to the Tests project looks like:

mono ~/.nuget/packages/xunit.runner.console/2.3.1/tools/net452/xunit.console.exe bin/Debug/net452/Infer.Tests.dll -notrait Category=OpenBug -notrait Category=BadTest -notrait Category=CompilerOptionsTest -notrait Category=CsoftModel -notrait Category=ModifiesGlobals -notrait Category=DistributedTest -notrait Category=Performance

mono ~/.nuget/packages/xunit.runner.console/2.3.1/tools/net452/xunit.console.exe bin/Debug/net452/Infer.Tests.dll -trait Category=CsoftModel -trait Category=ModifiesGlobals -trait Category=DistributedTests -trait Category=Performance -notrait Category=OpenBug -notrait Category=BadTest -notrait Category=CompilerOptionsTest -parallel none

To run the same set of tests on .net core:

dotnet ~/.nuget/packages/xunit.runner.console/2.3.1/tools/netcoreapp2.0/xunit.console.dll bin/Debug/netcoreapp2.0/Infer.Tests.dll -notrait Category=OpenBug -notrait Category=BadTest -notrait Category=CompilerOptionsTest -notrait Category=CsoftModel -notrait Category=ModifiesGlobals -notrait Category=DistributedTest -notrait Category=Performance

dotnet ~/.nuget/packages/xunit.runner.console/2.3.1/tools/netcoreapp2.0/xunit.console.dll bin/Debug/netcoreapp2.0/Infer.Tests.dll -trait Category=CsoftModel -trait Category=ModifiesGlobals -trait Category=DistributedTests -trait Category=Performance -notrait Category=OpenBug -notrait Category=BadTest -notrait Category=CompilerOptionsTest -parallel none

Helper scripts monotest.sh and netcoretest.sh for running unit tests on Mono and .net core respectively are located in the test folder.