This unique open access book applies the functional OCaml programming language to numerical or computational weighted data science, engineering, and scientific applications. This book is based on the authors' first-hand experience building and maintaining Owl, an OCaml-based numerical computing library. You'll first learn the various components in a modern numerical computation library. Then, you will learn how these components are designed and built up and how to optimize their performance. After reading and using this book, you'll have the knowledge required to design and build real-world complex systems that effectively leverage the advantages of the OCaml functional programming language. What You Will Learn Optimize core operations based on N-dimensional arrays Design and implement an industry-level algorithmic differentiation module Implement mathematical optimization, regression, and deep neural network functionalities based on algorithmic differentiation Design and optimize a computation graph module, and understand the benefits it brings to the numerical computing library Accommodate the growing number of hardware accelerators (e.g. GPU, TPU) and execution backends (e.g. web browser, unikernel) of numerical computation Use the Zoo system for efficient scripting, code sharing, service deployment, and composition Design and implement a distributed computing engine to work with a numerical computing library, providing convenient APIs and high performance Who This Book Is For Those with prior programming experience, especially with the OCaml programming language, or with scientific computing experience who may be new to OCaml. Most importantly, it is for those who are eager to understand not only how to use something, but also how it is built up.

This book is about the harmonious synthesis of functional programming and numerical computation. It shows how the expressiveness of OCaml allows for fast and safe development of data science applications. Step by step, the authors build up to use cases drawn from many areas of Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI, and then delve into how to deploy at scale, using parallel, distributed, and accelerated frameworks to gain all the advantages of cloud computing environments. To this end, the book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different area. Part I begins by introducing how basic numerical techniques are performed in OCaml, including classical mathematical topics (interpolation and quadrature), statistics, and linear algebra. It moves on from using only scalar values to multi-dimensional arrays, introducing the tensor and Ndarray, core data types in any numerical computing system. It concludes with two more classical numerical computing topics, the solution of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and Signal Processing, as well as introducing the visualization module we use throughout this book. Part II is dedicated to advanced optimization techniques that are core to most current popular data science fields. We do not focus only on applications but also on the basic building blocks, starting with Algorithmic Differentiation, the most crucial building block that in turn enables Deep Neural Networks. We follow this with chapters on Optimization and Regression, also used in building Deep Neural Networks. We then introduce Deep Neural Networks as well as topic modelling in Natural Language Processing (NLP), two advanced and currently very active fields in both industry and academia. Part III collects a range of case studies demonstrating how you can build a complete numerical application quickly from scratch using Owl. The cases presented include computer vision and recommender systems. This book aims at anyone with a basic knowledge of functional programming and a desire to explore the world of scientific computing, whether to generally explore the field in the round, to build applications for particular topics, or to deep-dive into how numerical systems are constructed. It does not assume strict ordering in reading - readers can simply jump to the topic that interests them most.