Read data from memory in Vowpal Wabbit?

Question

Is there a way to send data to train a model in Vowpal Wabbit without writing it to disk?

Here\'s what I\'m trying to do. I have a relatively large dataset in csv (aroun

Answer 1

Vowpal Wabbit supports reading data from standard input (cat train.dat | vw), so you can open a pipe directly from R.

Daemon mode supports training. If you need incremental/contiguous learning, you can use a trick with a dummy example whose tag starts with string "save". Optionally you can specify the model filename as well:

1 save_filename| 

Yet another option is to use VW as library, see an example.

Note that VW supports various feature engineering using feature namespaces.