# Optunity¶

Optunity is a library containing various optimizers for hyperparameter tuning. Hyperparameter tuning is a recurrent problem in many machine learning tasks, both supervised and unsupervised.This package provides several distinct approaches to solve such problems including some helpful facilities such as cross-validation and a plethora of score functions.

From an optimization point of view, the tuning problem can be considered as follows: the objective function is non-convex, non-smooth and typically expensive to evaluate. Tuning examples include optimizing regularization or kernel parameters.

The Optunity library is implemented in Python and allows straightforward integration in other machine learning environments. Optunity will soon become available in R and MATLAB.

Optunity is free software, using a BSD-style license.

## User Guide¶

Quick setup

Issue the following commands to get started on Linux:

git clone https://github.com/claesenm/optunity.git
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$(pwd)/optunity/


Afterwards, importing optunity should work in Python:

python -c 'import optunity'


For a proper installation, run the following:

python optunity/setup.py install


Installation may require superuser priviliges.

Examples of Optunity usage

• Optimizing a simple function
• Tuning SVM hyperparameters

For more examples, please see our examples page.

## Contributors¶

Optunity is developed at the STADIUS lab of the dept. of electrical engineering at KU Leuven (ESAT). The main contributors to Optunity are:

Marc Claesen

• Python package
• framework design & implementation
• solver implementation
• communication protocol design & implementation
• MATLAB wrapper

Jaak Simm

• communication protocol design
• R wrapper

Dusan Popovic

• code examples