Progress Manager

As the name suggests, the progress manager is a class which can manage the display of task progress to the user, either through a GUI popup window or in the command-line, depending on how Weka is being run. The class calculates an ETA for the task, calculated on the current iteration speed.

In addition to iterative tasks (e.g., training a model for n iterations), the progress manager can be used for indeterminate tasks - those without a clear number of iterations/notion of progress.

Usage Examples

Iterative Progress Bar

class ProgressManagerIterative {
    public void buildClassifier() {
        int numIterations = 10;
        ProgressManager progressMgr = new ProgressManager(numIterations, "Training Dl4jMlpClassifier...");
        progressMgr.start();
        for (int i = 0; i < numIterations; i++) {
            // Train classifier for iteration
            runIteration();
            // Update the progress manager
            progressMgr.increment();
        }
        // Close out the progress bar
        progressMgr.finish();
    }
}

Indeterminate Progress Bar

class ProgressManagerIndeterminate {
    public void loadModelWithProgressManager() {
        // Initializing without a specified number of iterations sets the manager to indeterminate mode
        ProgressManager progressMgr = new ProgressManager("Initializing pretrained model and parsing layers");
        progressMgr.start();

        loadWeightsFromModel();

        progressMgr.finish();
    }
}

Progress Manager for 'Stoppable' Tasks

For some tasks in WEKA (e.g., applying a filter), the main process can be stopped (e.g., by clicking Stop in the Preprocess panel).

Under the hood, a separate thread is created for the process (to avoid freezing the GUI thread), and most Stop button implentations call processThread.stop to stop the task.

This breaks out of the task's code by throwing a ThreadDeath exception, which means that in the Indeterminate example above, if the thread is stopped during loadWeightsFromModel(), finish() is never called on the progress manager and so the popup window doesn't get closed. This has no other side-effects (apart from leaving the popup open) but if you would like to close the popup window when the task is stopped, you must wrap the task in a try,catch block, and close the progress manager before exiting out e.g.,:

class ProgressManagerIndeterminate {
    public void loadModelWithProgressManager() {
        // Initializing without a specified number of iterations sets the manager to indeterminate mode
        ProgressManager progressMgr = new ProgressManager("Initializing pretrained model and parsing layers");
        progressMgr.start();

        try {
            loadWeightsFromModel();
        } catch (ThreadDeath threadDeath) {
            System.err.println("Process stopped prematurely");
            progressMgr.finish();
            throw new ThreadDeath();
        } 

        progressMgr.finish();
    }
}