Mlxtend

What do you like best?

I loved its frequent patterns tools apriori and association rules because other common libraries did not have it back then and when I could find those in Mlxtend which was easy to implement, I was so happy.

I also liked how easy it was create ensembled models with Mlxtend's VoteClassifier tools where I was able to test both soft and hard voting for my classification problems.

What do you dislike?

Even though it does not take huge preprocessing effort before using apriori and association rules functions, it does require some. Besides the format was not explicitly given in the documentation so I spent time on this.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

VoteClassifer is a good tool but if your data is big, then re-training every model will take time so consider "Dynamic Programming", saving the learned result follow a more manual approach.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I used Mlxtend for its frequen patterns tool in the first place, using apriori and association rules algorithms where I looked for the frequent purchases of customers. It was simple and fun to use since it did not require that much in terms of formatting and preprocessing.

Then I used Mlxtend during my machine learning projects to ensemble multiple models. For instance, it has EnsembleVoteClassifier which can do both "hard" and "soft" voting during classification problems.