Ask HN: What are the most commonly used languages for machine learning?
A coworker just asked me this and I didn't have a clue. Does anyone know of a paper or resource or something that may have some information?
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Chiming in as a machine learning researcher. My experience is primarily focused on the 'deep learning' buzzword at the moment, so people still researching SVM/NN/clustering may have different experiences.
Academic machine learning is starting to shift towards Python. Most (all?) of the main deep learning packages have either Python as the core (like PyLearn2 + Theano) or a strong Python component (like Caffe or DeepLearn). There is some Java presence (like DeepLearning4j) and some C++ mixed in for the very high performance code. Usually people will write the glue code in Python and then do the heavy matrix-intensive operations using PyCuda or cuBLAS (which are, to oversimplify, Python wrappers of C++ calls to CUDA/OpenCL code).
Some of the bigger names in Deep Learning:
(C++ w/ Python & Matlab support) Caffe: https://github.com/BVLC/caffe Their talk has links to a lot of other implementations.
(Python) PyLearn2: https://github.com/lisa-lab/pylearn2 Another popular deep-learning project.
(Java) DeepLearning 4j: https://github.com/agibsonccc/java-deeplearning
(C++ + Python) Cuda-Convnet: https://code.google.com/p/cuda-convnet/ Has C++ for the learning portions and Python glue.
Somewhat related: Statistical Languages http://101.datascience.community/2014/07/07/statistical-prog...
Here is another list: http://101.datascience.community/2012/12/31/5-free-programmi...
Certainly not commonly used, but might be worth checking out.