String Processing Utilities
Many Machine learning libraries like mlpack are built upon a core of LAPACK- and BLAS-like algorithms that expect numeric data (specifically, single or double precision numeric data). But much of today's interesting data is in other formats, such as dates or strings. Some machine learning libraries handle this by writing generic algorithms that can also support types like strings; but this can cause huge runtime penalties. Instead it is better to provide some utilities that can convert string datatypes (or other datatypes) to the numeric datatypes required by the algorithms implemented for those Machine learning libraries