Installation Guide

Stable Version

The stable version is available via PyPI using:

$ pip install deep-forest

The package is portable and with very few package dependencies. It is recommended to use the package environment from Anaconda since it already installs all required packages.

Notice that only the 64-bit Linux, Windows, and Mac-OS platform are officially supported. To use deep forest on other platforms, you will need to build the entire package from source.

Building from Source

Building from source is required to work on a contribution (bug fix, new feature, code or documentation improvement).

  • Use Git to check out the latest source from the repository on Gitee or Github:

$ git clone https://gitee.com/lamda-nju/deep-forest.git
$ git clone https://github.com/LAMDA-NJU/Deep-Forest.git
$ cd Deep-Forest

  • Install a C compiler for your platform.

Note

The compiler is used to compile the Cython files in the package. Please refer to Installing Cython for details on choosing the compiler.

  • Optional (but recommended): create and activate a dedicated virtual environment or conda environment.

  • Build the project with pip in the editable mode:

$ pip install --verbose -e .

Note

The key advantage of the editable mode is that there is no need to re-install the entire package if you have modified a Python file. However, you still have to run the pip install --verbose -e . command again if the source code of a Cython file is updated (ending with .pyx or .pxd).

  • Optional: run the tests on the module:

$ cd tests
% pytest

Acknowledgement

The installation instructions were adapted from Scikit-Learn’s advanced installation instructions.