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The Accord.NET project provides machine learning, statistics, artificial intelligence, computer vision and image processing methods to .NET. It can be used on Microsoft Windows, Xamarin, Unity3D, Windows Store applications, Linux or mobile.

After merging with the AForge.NET project, the framework now offers a unified API for learning/training machine learning models that is both easy to useand extensible. It is based on the following pattern:

• Choose alearning algorithm that provides a Learn(x, y) or Learn(x) method;
• Use the Learn(x, y) to create amachine learning model learned from the data;
• Use the model'sTransform,Decide,Scores,Probabilities orLogLikelihoods methods.

For more information, please see thegetting started guide, and checkthe classfication wiki.Please do not hesitate to edit the wiki if you would like!

Update (10/05/2020): Please see thecurrent status section below before you start using this library in any new projects.

To install the framework in your application, please use NuGet. If you are on Visual Studio, right-click on the "References" item in your solution folder, and select "Manage NuGet Packages." Search for Accord.MachineLearning (or equivalently, Accord.Math, Accord.Statistics or Accord.Imaging depending on your initial goal) and select "Install."

If you would like to install the framework onUnity3D applications, download the "libsonly" compressed archive from theframework releases page. Navigate to the Releases/Mono folder, and copy the .dll files to the Plugins folder in your Unity project. Finally, find and add the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll assembly that should be available from your system to the Plugin folders as well.

The framework comes with a wide range of sample applications to help get you started quickly. If you downloaded the framework sources or cloned the repository, open theSamples.sln solution file in the Samples folder.

Please download and install the following dependencies:

• T4 Toolbox for Visual Studio 2015
• Sandcastle Help File Builder (with VS2015 extension)
• NUnit 3 Test Adapter

Then navigate to the Sources directory, and open theAccord.NET.sln solution file. Note: the solution includes F# unit test projects that can be disabled/unloaded from the solution in case you do not have support for F# tools in your version of Visual Studio.

Please download and install the following dependencies:

• T4 Toolbox for Visual Studio 2017
• Sandcastle Help File Builder (with VS2017 extension)
• NUnit 3 Test Adapter
• Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 (both x64 and x86)

Then navigate to the Sources directory, and open theAccord.NET.sln solution file. Note: the solution includes F# unit test projects that can be disabled/unloaded from the solution in case you do not have support for F# tools in your version of Visual Studio.

# Install Monosudo apt-get install mono-complete monodevelop monodevelop-nunit git autoconf make# Clone the repositorygit clone https://github.com/accord-net/framework.git# Enter the directorycd framework# Build the framework solution using Mono./autogen.shmake buildmake samplesmaketest

# Install Monobrew updatebrew cask install mono-mdk pkg-config automake# Clone the repositorygit clone https://github.com/accord-net/framework.git# Enter the directorycd framework# Set some environment variables with OSX-specific pathsexport PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/lib/pkgconfig/export MONO=/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/bin/monoexport XBUILD=/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/bin/xbuild# Build the framework solution using Mono./autogen.shmake buildmake samplesmaketest

If you would like to contribute, please do so by helping us update theproject's Wiki pages. While you could also make a donation through PayPal, Flattr, or any of the cryptocurrencies shown below, as well as fill-in bug reports and contribute code in the form of pull requests, the most precious donation we could receive would be a bit of your time -please take some minutes to submit us more documentation examples to our Wiki pages 😉

Donate using cryptocurrencies:

• BTC: 1FC5gxLs2TsvuiHPP1tRLh5mPboQJQghvZ
• ETH: 0x36FDA635Ef5773d8B376037D7BAfF22FeB987d92
• LTC: LNjkZkMdSyncUvg5WnnhDNirdux4Q95gdt

Note: all donations are 100% invested towards improving the framework, including, but not limited to, the hiring of extra developers to work on issues currently present at the project's issue tracker. If you would like to donate resources towards the development of a particular issue, please let us know!

Join the chat athttps://gitter.im/accord-net/framework - but to have issues and questions answered,post it as an issue.

Before you decide to use the framework for new projects, please see the following personal note below.

I am writing this note to give an official status for the project.

This project has certainly been the most important thing I have ever created, but I could not keep up with maintaining it as well as I wanted. This project allowed me to achieve the biggest dream I had, and that I never though I would have been able to achieve in my life, which was (some may laugh and possibly not understand - specially if you did not know where I came from): starting a new life, and a new career, here in Europe.

For about 10 years, I had worked on this project almost every day of my life.

But with the new life, there came new steps to be climbed, and I suddently had new responsabilities and things that I absolutely needed to accomplish very well. I started a PhD and had to focus on it so I could not keep up maintaining the library for about three years. I tried to hire freelance developers to help maintain the project in the meantime I had to be absent, and it worked to some extent, but at some point, I did not have the resources to keep up with the development anymore. Eventually, I developed panic-level anxiety since I felt I had left so many people behind by not being able to keep up with the development of the project anymore. At all costs, I had decided to avoid at all costs opening the issues page of the project, or even checking my own personal e-mails, to avoid receiving new inquiries about the project.

Then, a few months before my PhD defense (which happened very well, actually!), Microsoft announced that they wanted to make ML.net, which I actually fully support, the standard approach for machine learning in .NET. While this is great news (because I fully support MS giving more support for ML needs out there), this eventually meantthat Accord.NET would eventually become obsolete as ML.net was on its path to become the de-facto ML library for .NET.

I think that the reasons above would have been already enough reasons to sustain my reasons on why I decided to not update Accord.NET anymore. However... in addition, I have to say that, as a researcher, and not solely as a developer, I have also published in, and attended to,the most important machine learning conferences in the world to date. And under this context, I need to say that, in the academia,no one has ever heard of the framework or the project itself. From my experience, people in those conferences can laugh or even mistreat you, if you mention you have ever developed anything in C#, specially for machine learning, as everyone [understandably] uses Python nowadays to accomplish tasks in this domain (I myself only use Python to do my work, and while I love C#/.NET, there is nothing that can compete with Python/Pytorch nowadays).

Therefore, in the past months, I have been pondering about archiving the project. To avoid that,I am willing to make someone who would like, also an administrator of the project.

I am also willing to change the license of any file where I am the single author (you can check the copyright headers in each file) toMIT so people can reuse individual pieces of code more easily. Anyone who becomes administrator is welcome to slice the parts of the project that still make sense to exist (e.g., the FFmpeg wrappers, statistical distributions, statistical tests and the simple transforms like PCA) and even start new libraries (hopefully in .NET Core) providing only them if wanted.

Also, when I started this project back in 2007 (and when the original AForge library started, even way before that), there were almost no other libraries we could built upon, so we had to do start almost everything from scratch. This is not the case anymore. Any new libraries coming out of this project shoulddefinitely reuse existing libraries for basic tasks such as matrix operations and image processing.

Cesar De Souza
10-May-2020

Please cite this work as:

@misc{souza2014accord,title={The Accord.NET Framework},author={C{\'e}sar Souza and Andrew Kirillov and Marcos Diego Catalano and Accord.NET contributors},year={2014},doi={10.5281/zenodo.1029480},url={http://accord-framework.net}}

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