by Cory McKay (ACE 1.x) and Jessica Thompson (ACE 2.x) CIRMMT / Marianopolis College / McGill University Copyright (C) 2017 (GNU GPL)
ACE is a metalearning classification framework that automatically experiments with various dimensionality reduction and machine learning techniques to find an approach that is well suited to each particular application. ACE is designed primarily with the needs of music classification in mind, but may be used for arbitrary classification tasks. ACE can read the standardized ACE XML 1 formats as well as University of Waikato Weka ARFF files.
ACE 2.x is a significant redesign and expansion and improvement of ACE 1.1, which is also available at http://jmir.sourceforge.net. It should be noted, however, that the ACE 2.x GUI is not yet complete; it can currently only display ACE XML data, but may not perform machine learning operations on it. The command line interface is fully functional, however, and users may perform the full range of machine learning operations with it (or via the API, if they prefer).
ACE was developed as part of the jMIR music classification research software suite, and may be used either as part of this suite or independently.
A folder entitled "ACE_Manual" is extracted upon installation. This holds HTML files that provide many more details than this README document. Open the "ACEManual.html" file to access the manual.
More information on jMIR is available at http://jmir.sourceforge.net.
Please contact Cory McKay (cory.mckay@mail.mcgill.ca) with any bug reports or questions relating to the software.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You may obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
This project software makes use of two included third-party products.
The University of Waikato Weka data mining package is used to parse and save Weka ARFF files. This software is also available under the GNU GPL, and more information on it is available at http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka.
This project also includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org), namely the Xerces library, which is used to parse XML files. The Xerces license can be accessed via the manual.
This software is written in Java, which means that it can theoretically be run on any system that has the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on it. It is recommended that this software be used with Windows, however, as it was developed and tested under the Windows operating system, and the interface's appearance was developed under Windows. Although the software should theoretically run under OS X, Linux, Solaris or any other operating system with the JRE installed on it, users should be advised that the software has not yet been fully tested on other platforms, so difficulties may be encountered.
This software was developed with version 1.6.0_16 of the JDK (Java Development Kit), so it is suggested that the corresponding version or higher of the JRE be installed on the user's computer.
If your system already has the JRE installed, as will most typically be the case, you may skip this section. If not, you will need to install the JRE in order to run this project. The JRE can be downloaded for free from the Java web site. The JDK typically includes the JRE, or the JRE can simply be installed alone.
When the JRE download is complete, follow the installation instructions that come with it in order to install it.
The project can be accessed at http://jmir.sourceforge.net. This distribution includes a pre-compiled Jar file, the source code and extensive documentation. All of this is delivered in a zipped file, from which the project files can be extracted.
There are two versions of the project, namely the developer version and the user version. The user version contains everything needed to run the project, but does not include any source code. The developer version does include source code, presented in the form of a NetBeans project.
The user version unzips into a single directory. Installation simply involves copying this directory into any desired location.
The following directories are contained in the developer zip file:
- ACE: The ACE project, presented in the form of a NetBeans project. Contains the
following directories and files:
- ACE_Manual: Contains the project's HTML manual.
- dist: Contains a pre-compiled ACE.jar file (and associated libraries) for direct inclusion in other projects.
- javadoc: Javadoc documentation for the project source code.
- licenses: Licenses associated with the project and its dependencies.
- nbproject: NetBeans project files. This is only relevant to those wishing to use the software in a NetBeans IDE context; it is certainly possible to use the software in other development environments as well.
- src: The project's source code.
- build.xml: NetBeans build instructions. Only relevant if using the NetBeans IDE.
- manifest.mf: The manifest used when building the project Jar file.
- README.txt: Basic overall documentation of the project.
- Third-Party-Jars: Contains the distributable third-party software used by the project. Also includes the jar files for other jMIR projects that this project has as adependencies, if any. These need to be included in the project's build (in the NetBeans context, this means adding the jar files found here as libraries).
A file named "ACE.jar" is produced upon installation. Double clicking on this file will open the GUI. However, the GUI currently only allows users to view and edit ACE XML 1.1 files, not to perform machine learning tasks.
Users must use the command line to access the full range of ACE's functionality. In Windows, for example, access DOS under by going to the Start Menu, selecting Run and typing "cmd". Then use the "cd" command to move to the directory that contains the ACE.jar file. In that directory, type:
java -jar ACE.jar ...
The ... indicates the appropriate flags for the task that the user wishes to perform. Details are provided in the ACE manual.
It should be noted that the JRE does not always allocate sufficient memory for ACE to process large amounts of data. Running ACE using either of the above two methods could therefore result in an out of memory error (although this is relatively rare).
It is therefore sometimes preferable to manually allocate a greater amount of memory to ACE before running it. 1000 MB should be more than enough for most situations. This can be done by entering the following at the command prompt:
java -mx1000M -jar ACE.jar ...
ACE 2.2.2
- Updated the saveToARFF method in ace.datatypes.DataBoard to auto- generate feature definitions if they are not explicitly present.
- Fixed a bug in the GUI manual display.
- Updated support libraries.
- Minor documentation updates.
ACE 2.2.1
- Fixed a bug related to parsing ACE XML files.
- Updated UtilityClasses support libraries.
ACE 2.2
- Minor bug fixes
- Includes updated support libraries (UtilityClasses and Weka 3.6.1).
ACE 2.0:
- Improved API: The overall architectural structure of ACE 2.0 has been entirely redesigned in order to simplify and facilitate the use of ACE as a library by external software.
- Improved Command Line Interface: The command line interface has been improved in order to make its use more intuitive and in order to provide users with additional ways of customizing processing.
- Updated GUI: A GUI is now available for viewing and editing ACE XML files. Meta-learning functionality is still restricted to the command line interface and API at this point, however, although there are plans to expand the GUI functionality.
- Improved Cross-Validation: ACE now performs its own customized cross-validation in order to provide new options and more statistics than were available when Weka's cross-validation implementation that was previously used.
- ACE XML ZIP and Project Files: The ACE XML Project and ZIP files allows users to associate multiple ACE XML files together so that they may be automatically saved or loaded together, and the ZIP format makes it possible to package all files referred to in a Project file into a single compressed ZIP file.