Infer.NET is a

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

.NET software library for

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. It supports running

Bayesian inference Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, a ...

in graphical models and can also be used for

probabilistic programming Probabilistic programming (PP) is a programming paradigm in which probabilistic models are specified and inference for these models is performed automatically. It represents an attempt to unify probabilistic modeling and traditional general pur ...

Overview

Infer.NET follows a model-based approach and is used to solve different kinds of machine learning problems including standard problems like classification, recommendation or clustering, customized solutions and domain-specific problems. The framework is used in various different domains such as

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidenc ...

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

, and

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...

. Development of the framework was started by a team at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

’s research centre in

Cambridge, UK Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

in 2004. It was first released for academic use in 2008 and later open sourced in 2018. In 2013, Microsoft was awarded the USPTO’s Patents for Humanity Award in Information Technology category for Infer.NET and the work in advanced machine learning techniques. Infer.NET is used internally at Microsoft as the machine learning engine in some of their products such as

Office An office is a space where an Organization, organization's employees perform Business administration, administrative Work (human activity), work in order to support and realize objects and Goals, plans, action theory, goals of the organizati ...

, Azure, and

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by the na ...

. The source code is licensed under

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

and available on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

. It is also available as

NuGet NuGet (pronounced "New Get")And The Winner Is, NuGet
haacke ...

package.

References

External links

Infer.NET

GitHub - dotnet/infer

Machine Intelligence and Perception - Microsoft Research

Infer.NET - Practical Implementation Issues and a Comparison of Approximation Techniques
{{Microsoft Research Applied machine learning Applications of artificial intelligence Free and open-source software Microsoft free software Microsoft Research Software that uses Mono (software) Open-source artificial intelligence Probabilistic models Probabilistic software Software using the MIT license 2008 software

Overview

See also

References

Further reading

External links