Pymanopt: A Python Toolbox for Optimization on Manifolds using Automatic Differentiation

We have covered Manopt before several times ( tag Manopt). It now comes to Python. From the paper:

Further successful applications of optimization on manifolds include matrix completion tasks (Vandereycken, 2013; Boumal and Absil, 2015), robust PCA (Podosinnikova et al., 2014), dimension reduction for independent component analysis (ICA) (Theis et al., 2009), kernel ICA (Shen et al., 2007) and similarity learning (Shalit et al., 2012).
Many more applications to machine learning and other elds exist. While a full survey on the usefulness of these methods is well beyond the scope of this manuscript, we highlight that at the time of writing, a search for the term \manifold optimization" on the IEEE Xplore Digital Library lists 1065 results; the Manopt toolbox itself is referenced in 90 papers indexed by Google Scholar.

It looks like that at the time of this writing, it is more like 126 times that the Manopt toolbow has been referenced in Google Scholar.

Pymanopt: A Python Toolbox for Optimization on Manifolds using Automatic Differentiation by  James Townsend, Niklas Koep, Sebastian Weichwald

Optimization on manifolds is a class of methods for optimization of an objective function, subject to constraints which are smooth, in the sense that the set of points which satisfy the constraints admits the structure of a differentiable manifold. While many optimization problems are of the described form, technicalities of differential geometry and the laborious calculation of derivatives pose a significant barrier for experimenting with these methods.
We introduce Pymanopt (available at this https URL), a toolbox for optimization on manifolds, implemented in Python, that---similarly to the Manopt Matlab toolbox---implements several manifold geometries and optimization algorithms. Moreover, we lower the barriers to users further by using automated differentiation for calculating derivative information, saving users time and saving them from potential calculation and implementation errors.

 
 The implementation is here: https://pymanopt.github.io/

 

h/t Nando. 
 
 

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