In tidymodels/parsnip: A Common API to Modeling and Analysis Functions

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parsnip

Introduction

The goal of parsnip is to provide a tidy, unified interface to models that can be used to try a range of models without getting bogged down in the syntactical minutiae of the underlying packages.

Installation

# The easiest way to get parsnip is to install all of tidymodels:
install.packages("tidymodels")

# Alternatively, install just parsnip:
install.packages("parsnip")

# Or the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("tidymodels/parsnip")

Getting started

One challenge with different modeling functions available in R that do the same thing is that they can have different interfaces and arguments. For example, to fit a random forest regression model, we might have:

# From randomForest
rf_1 <- randomForest(
  y ~ ., 
  data = dat, 
  mtry = 10, 
  ntree = 2000, 
  importance = TRUE
)

# From ranger
rf_2 <- ranger(
  y ~ ., 
  data = dat, 
  mtry = 10, 
  num.trees = 2000, 
  importance = "impurity"
)

# From sparklyr
rf_3 <- ml_random_forest(
  dat, 
  intercept = FALSE, 
  response = "y", 
  features = names(dat)[names(dat) != "y"], 
  col.sample.rate = 10,
  num.trees = 2000
)

Note that the model syntax can be very different and that the argument names (and formats) are also different. This is a pain if you switch between implementations.

In this example:

the type of model is "random forest",
the mode of the model is "regression" (as opposed to classification, etc), and
the computational engine is the name of the R package.

The goals of parsnip are to:

Separate the definition of a model from its evaluation.
Decouple the model specification from the implementation (whether the implementation is in R, spark, or something else). For example, the user would call rand_forest instead of ranger::ranger or other specific packages.
Harmonize argument names (e.g. n.trees, ntrees, trees) so that users only need to remember a single name. This will help across model types too so that trees will be the same argument across random forest as well as boosting or bagging.

Using the example above, the parsnip approach would be:

library(parsnip)

rand_forest(mtry = 10, trees = 2000) %>%
  set_engine("ranger", importance = "impurity") %>%
  set_mode("regression")

The engine can be easily changed. To use Spark, the change is straightforward:

rand_forest(mtry = 10, trees = 2000) %>%
  set_engine("spark") %>%
  set_mode("regression")

Either one of these model specifications can be fit in the same way:

set.seed(192)
rand_forest(mtry = 10, trees = 2000) %>%
  set_engine("ranger", importance = "impurity") %>%
  set_mode("regression") %>%
  fit(mpg ~ ., data = mtcars)

A list of all parsnip models across different CRAN packages can be found at https://www.tidymodels.org/find/parsnip.

Contributing

This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

For questions and discussions about tidymodels packages, modeling, and machine learning, please post on RStudio Community.
If you think you have encountered a bug, please submit an issue.
Either way, learn how to create and share a reprex (a minimal, reproducible example), to clearly communicate about your code.
Check out further details on contributing guidelines for tidymodels packages and how to get help.