Infer.NET

Infer.NET
Original author	Microsoft Research
Developers	Microsoft, .NET Foundation
Initial release	2008 (2008)
Stable release	v0.4.2301.0301 / January 3, 2023 (2023-01-03)
Repository	github.com/dotnet/infer
Written in	C#
Engine
Operating system	Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux
Platform	.NET Framework, .NET, Mono
Type	Machine learning software library
License	MIT License
Website	dotnet.github.io/infer/

Infer.NET is a free and open source .NET software library for machine learning. It supports running Bayesian inference in graphical models and can also be used for probabilistic programming.

Overview

Infer.NET follows a model-based approach and is used to solve different kinds of machine learning problems including standard problems like classification, recommendation or clustering, customized solutions and domain-specific problems. The framework is used in various different domains such as bioinformatics, epidemiology, computer vision, and information retrieval.

Development of the framework was started by a team at Microsoft’s research centre in Cambridge, UK in 2004. It was first released for academic use in 2008 and later open sourced in 2018. In 2013, Microsoft was awarded the USPTO’s Patents for Humanity Award in Information Technology category for Infer.NET and the work in advanced machine learning techniques.

Infer.NET is used internally at Microsoft as the machine learning engine in some of their products such as Office, Azure, and Xbox.

The source code is licensed under MIT License and available on GitHub. It is also available as NuGet package.

See also

• Machine learning
• ML.NET
• scikit-learn

External links

• Infer.NET
• GitHub - dotnet/infer
• Machine Intelligence and Perception - Microsoft Research
• Infer.NET - Practical Implementation Issues and a Comparison of Approximation Techniques