Max Kuhn's Twins: caret | tidymodels
Max Kuhn is the writer of both packages -- caret and tidymodels. Both packages are used for building machine learning models. Package caret was released in 2008 and package tidymodels was released recently in April 2020.
Caret package is a standalone machine learning model building package that offers a compact and comprehensive range of tools while tidymodels is a meta-package or collection of packages that are used for machine learning model development.
The tidymodels package leverages functionality from various packages: rsample, workflows, tune, dials, parsnip, recipes, broom, and yardstick. It shares the data structures between the different packages through tidyverse package.
The tidyverse is a collection of R packages introduced by Hadley Wickham and his team that share underlying data structures. The tidyverse packages include extensive use of non-standard evaluation and piping-based command structures.
The caret package is a decade-old package hence you may easily find solutions for the problems but the tidymodels package is a newer package and it is still in the development phase. Sometimes, you may encounter bugs in tidymodels due to this reason.
Rebecca Barter in her blog states that the caret package shows a slower performance when even a modest level of model building is tried while tidymodels is a newer interface that offers advanced-level coordination with other packages.
Further Rebecca Barter states that to build ML models with tidymodels, you need to be proficient in multiple packages like tidyverse, tibble and purrr while in the case of caret, it has its own command chunks which can be stacked together.
The tidymodels is a bit of a loosely-knit meta-package of other packages. For the bigger projects, tidymodels package can create workflow bugs, and solutions to these bugs may not be available in the community. But, it may be a good choice to showcase ML model development skills for personal and smaller projects.
#R #r #machinelearning #datascience #caret #tidymodels