How should I cite mlpack in my work?

Updated

Cite the mlpack 4 paper published in the Journal of Open Source Software. The mlpack website states that citations are useful for the continued development of the library, so if you use mlpack in published work, include this reference.

The official citation

The site provides the following paper as the citation to use:

mlpack 4: a fast, header-only C++ machine learning library.
R.R. Curtin, M. Edel, O. Shrit, S. Agrawal, S. Basak, J.J. Balamuta, R. Birmingham, K. Dutt, D. Eddelbuettel, R. Garg, S. Jaiswal, A. Kaushik, S. Kim, A. Mukherjee, N.G. Sai, N. Sharma, Y.S. Parihar, R. Swain, and C. Sanderson.
Journal of Open Source Software 8:82, 2023.

Why the project asks for it

The mlpack homepage explains that citations help support ongoing development. The project uses an open governance model and is fiscally sponsored by NumFOCUS, a nonprofit that supports open source scientific computing. Alongside donations, citations are one way the project measures and sustains its impact.

Where to find it

The citation appears on the mlpack home page, alongside the download link, license, and support information. If you need the current version of the reference, check the site directly rather than relying on a cached copy, since the paper details and version number are tied to the release the project points to.

Practical notes

  • The paper covers mlpack 4, the header-only C++ library, so it is the appropriate reference for work using that version.
  • mlpack is distributed under the permissive 3-clause BSD license, which is separate from the citation request: the license governs use and redistribution, while the citation is a scholarly acknowledgment.
  • If you use the Python, Julia, R, Go, or command-line bindings, the same underlying library and paper apply.