Bob-Python bindings for LIBSVM

This package contains a set of Pythonic bindings for LIBSVM.

External Software Requirements

This package requires you have LIBSVM installed on your system. If LIBSVM is installed on a standard location, this package will find it automatically. You can just skip to the installation instructions.

In case you have installed LIBSVM on a non-standard location (e.g. your home directory), then you can specify the path to the root of that installation using the environment variable BOB_PREFIX_PATH, before building and installing the package. For example, if BOB_PREFIX_PATH is set to /home/user/libsvm-3.12, then we will search for the header file svm.h in /home/user/libsvm-3.12/include and expect that the library file file is found under /home/user/libsvm-3.12/lib.

If you are installing this package via pip for example, just set the environment variable like this:

$ BOB_PREFIX_PATH=/home/user/libsvm-3.12 pip install bob.learn.libsvm

If you are installing this package via zc.buildout, we recommend you use our bob.buildout extension and set the [environ] section to define BOB_PREFIX_PATH.

Installation

Install it through normal means, via pip or use zc.buildout to bootstrap the package itself and run test units.

Documentation

The latest version of the documentation can be found here.

Otherwise, you can generate the documentation for this package yourself, after installation, using Sphinx:

$ sphinx-build -b html doc sphinx

This shall place in the directory sphinx, the current version for the documentation of the package.

Testing

You can run a set of tests using the nose test runner:

$ nosetests -sv

Warning

If Bob <= 1.2.1 is installed on your python path, nose will automatically load the old version of the insulate plugin available in Bob, which will trigger the loading of incompatible shared libraries (from Bob itself), in to your working binary. This will cause a stack corruption. Either remove the centrally installed version of Bob, or build your own version of Python in which Bob <= 1.2.1 is not installed.

You can run our documentation tests using sphinx itself:

$ sphinx-build -b doctest doc sphinx

You can test overall test coverage with:

$ nosetests --with-coverage --cover-package=bob.learn.libsvm

The coverage egg must be installed for this to work properly.

Development

To develop this package, install using zc.buildout, using the buildout configuration found on the root of the package:

$ python bootstrap.py
...
$ ./bin/buildout

Tweak the options in buildout.cfg to disable/enable verbosity and debug builds.