Introducing Vectorflow – Netflix Technology Blog – Medium

With the deluge of deep learning libraries and software innovation in the field over the last few years, it is an exciting time to be working on machine learning problems. Most of the libraries available evolved from fairly specialized computational code for large dense problems such as image classification into general frameworks for neural-network-based models offering marginal support for sparse models. At Netflix, our machine learning scientists deal with a wide variety of problems across a broad spectrum of areas: from tailoring TV and movie recommendations to your taste to optimizing encoding algorithms. A subset of our problems involve dealing with extremely sparse data; the total dimensionality of the problem at hand can easily reach tens of millions of features, even though every observation may only have a handful of non-zero entries. For these cases, we felt the need for a minimalist library that is specifically optimized for training shallow feedforward neural nets on sparse data in a single-machine, multi-core environment.