Orange (software)

Orange is a component-based data mining and machine learning software suite, featuring friendly yet powerful and flexible visual programming front-end for explorative data analysis and visualization, and Python bindings and libraries for scripting. It includes comprehensive set of components for data preprocessing, feature scoring and filtering, modeling, model evaluation, and exploration techniques. It is implemented in C++ (speed) and Python (flexibility). Its graphical user interface builds upon cross-platform Qt framework. Orange is distributed free under the GPL. It is maintained and developed at the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

History

• In 1996, the University of Ljubljana and Jožef Stefan Institute started development of ML*, a machine learning framework in C++.
• In 1997, Python bindings were developed for ML*, which together with emerging Python modules formed a joint framework called Orange.
• During the following years most major algorithms for data mining and machine learning have been developed either in C++ (Orange's core) or in Python modules.
• In 2002, first prototypes to create a flexible graphical user interface were designed, using Pmw Python megawidgets.
• In 2003, graphical user interface was redesigned and re-developed for Qt framework using PyQt Python bindings. The visual programming framework was defined, and development of widgets (graphical components of data analysis pipeline) has begun.
• In 2005, extensions for data analysis in bioinformatics was created.
• In 2008, Mac OS X DMG and Fink-based installation packages were developed.
• In 2009, over 100 widgets were created and maintained.
• From 2009, Orange is in 2.0 beta and web site offers installation packages based on daily compilation cycle.

Platform availability

Orange is supported on various versions of Linux, Apple's Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

See also

• Scikit-learn -- competing Python toolkit

External links

• Official website
• Bioinformatics Laboratory, University of Ljubljana