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Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2022 15:43:24 -0800
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Subject: PHP support for matrix operations - BLAS, LAPACK.
From: zardozrocks@gmail.com (j adams)

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I apologize if I have the wrong mailing list here. I'm hoping ot ask the
PHP developer community if there's any appetite for functions to handle
matrix operations and scientific computing.

I took a course on machine learning which had us code solutions using
matlab/octave. This year I embarked on trying to translate those functions
to PHP and have been quite surprised to learn that pure php is quite
inefficient for matrix multiplication. I've been trying to chase down an
effective way to perform matrix operations in PHP and posting my questions
and progress on this forum at PHPBuilder:
https://board.phpbuilder.com/d/10403480-converting-matlab-machine-learning-routines-to-php-need-matrix-operations

Fast matrix operations seem to be absolutely critical for machine learning,
at least for Support Vector Machines and Neural Networks. I know that there
is a FANN extension, but it seems to me that it would be beneficial for
PHP's use in scientific applications if it had support -- either natively
or via some extension -- for matrix operations and possibly other
statistical or scientific computations. Python has numpy, for example.

How does everyone feel about BLAS or LAPACK extension for PHP? I'm poorly
equipped to cook up such a thing, but these libraries already exist and
could offer great improvements in performance.

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