Custom development

Custom development for omega|ml is available for the following extensions:

  • storage backend & mixins - process and store new data types
  • model backend - integrate other machine learning frameworks or custom algorithms
  • runtime mixins & tasks - enable new tasks in the distributed compute-cluster

Backends provide the put,get semantics to store and retrieve objects where as mixins provide overrides or extensions to existing implementations. Think of a backend as the storage engine for objects a specific data type (e.g. a Pandas Dataframe) while a mixin provide the pre- or post-processing applied to these objects on specific method calls.


Technically, storage and model backends, as well as storage mixins, extend the capability of OmegaStore. Runtime mixins and tasks extend the capability of OmegaRuntime. MDataFrame mixins extend the capability of lazy-evaluation dataframes.

A data backend shall adhere to the protocol established by BaseDataBackend. Similarly a model backend shall adhere to to the protocol established by the BaseModelBackend.

Both backend types support the general storage put,get semantics to store and retrieve objects, respectively. Model backends in addition provide methods for specific model actions (e.g. fit and predict), following the semantics of scikit-learn_.


In principle a backend need not be a subclass of either of the two base backends, however there is some default processing implemented in the base backends __init__ methods so that sub-classing is the more practical method.

Mixins are objects that implement arbitrary methods for their respective target. For example, a mixin for OmegaStore may implement a get method, extending the store’s default implementation. Mixins are applied to their target the same way as a subclass would be.