Merge with AForge.NET

[cesarsouza]

In the early days, Accord.NET was created and designed as an extension framework for AForge.NET. However, since 2012, AForge.NET public support was ended. Thus, the current plan is to incorporate AForge.NET directly in Accord.NET, merging the two.

This will solve accord-net/base#3

[cesarsouza]

Since this would be a major breaking change, take this opportunity to:

• Add a static Vector class to accommodate vector operations (like the Matrix class)
• Add a static Jagged class to accomoddate Jagged matrix operations (like the Matrix class)
• Add a static Generator class to hold the framework Random number generator
• Add a static Scale class to hold scaling methods
• Change the argument order in the Scale class to allow for extension methods (as in new[] { 0, 1}.Scale(-1, +1))
• Rename Statistics.Tools to Statistics.Measures (holding mean, variance, etc)
• Remove the multiple "Tools" classes that exist across different framework assemblies. Their functionality should be moved to properly named static extension classes according to what each function does.

[cesarsouza]

Also make all distributions implement the INumberGenerator interface.

[aloisdg]

Nice idea !

[mathias-brandewinder]

A merge sounds reasonable; at that point, it's not entirely clear why some things are in one or the other library, and it makes finding things in various namespaces harder.
One thought: if additional algebra operations are going to be added, it might be worth re-visiting the idea of integrating with Math.NET? While Accord has expanded on the machine learning side, Math.NET has added some nice algebra features. One in particular is very interesting: the MKL provider (http://christoph.ruegg.name/blog/mathnet-numerics-with-native-linear-algebra.html)

[ethanwa]

Love this idea. One of the things I'd love to see moved over is FLANN.

[binbsr]

I actually love addition of algebraic operations. I have been using my own
custom methods like submatrix(), shuffle() etc. Waiting for the blend...

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 7:32 AM, ethanwa notifications@github.com wrote:

Love this idea. One of the things I'd love to see moved over is FLANN.

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#70 (comment).

[cesarsouza]

The AForge.NET codebase has been merged into the project. At this current stage, the two projects have been just blended in, and all previous namespaces (i.e. AForge.* namespaces) are still preserved.

The current plan is to ease the transition of projects linking against AForge.NET so they could be updated to refer to Accord.NET instead with minimum effort. As such, a new intermediary release will be produced without changing any AForge.NET namespace locations. This new release would be a direct drop-in replacement for AForge.NET, minimizing the number of breaking changes caused by the merge.

After this intermediary release, the two codebases will be integrated more closely, merging namespaces, removing duplicated functionality and extending existent features.

[aloisdg]

Great news !

[binbsr]

That's great...

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 8:29 PM, Alois notifications@github.com wrote:

Great news !

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#70 (comment)
.

[hzawary]

Ideal idea:) but why I don't see some classes since merge those, e.g. SOM or etc. I think the better one is adding whole of AForge namespaces.

[cesarsouza]

It is in the works! 😄

[CatchemAL]

Can this branch be deleted?

[cesarsouza]

Yep!