Too many mandatory dependencies about alibi HOT 5 CLOSED

Thank you for your interest in the library! I appreciate that we are a bit heavy on the dependencies, but we would need to think carefully which packages to split out as it would make several algorithms not work out-of-the-box for all use cases (e.g. we use tensorflow internally for optimization, opencv-python for downloading image datasets and spacy for NLP corpus use cases. One option would be to try split the dependencies across use cases, e.g. to enable nlp one could install alibi[nlp] or for image usecases alibi[cv]. Did you have any particular thoughts about this?

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Using opencv-python just to download datasets seems like overkill, but otherwise that's pretty much what I had in mind. Dask is a pretty good example of doing this, using both extras (https://github.com/dask/dask/blob/master/setup.py) and subsidiary packages: (e.g. https://github.com/dask/dask-ml, https://github.com/dask/dask-xgboost)

It's also worth considering that, if people want to explain keras models, then they will already have keras installed, so it may not be necessary to have it as an explicit extra.

If you're using tensorflow internally, then clearly it's OK to have that as an install dependency. Although if it's only used for a small subset of the functionality, then it might still be worth having as an extra, like some tools do for their CLI (e.g. https://github.com/theskumar/python-dotenv/blob/master/setup.py).

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Thanks for the feedback, I'm working on stripping out some of the unnecessary deps. For image downloading we can probably go with PIL instead of opencv which is much lighter.

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@jamesmyatt I've slimmed down the package a little in v0.2.1. For now we will not split it up depending on the use case, but this might change as the functionality grows and the API stabilises. Probably the heaviest dependency is tensorflow, it's quite key for some of the underlying optimization algorithms, but on the other hand not every method will use it. I will keep this issue open for now for further discussion.

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Will close for now as currently running a fairly minimal set of dependencies for what we want to do.

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