marco-dvcs 0.1.16

A minimal dataset versioning system for text data with a focus on reproducibility.

Marco Dataset Versioning System

A minimal dataset versioning system for text data with a strong focus on reproducibility and transparency. Treat your text datasets like code — immutable, versioned, reproducible, and explainable.

Marco acts as a lightweight Python library, meaning you can initialize it in any machine learning project folder to safely version and preprocess your datasets without altering your original files.

🚀 Installation (Linux / MacOS)

On modern Linux environments (like Arch Linux, Ubuntu 23.04+), Python packages must be installed in a Virtual Environment (PEP 668) to prevent conflicts with your system packages.

Follow these steps to safely install Marco into your ML project:

1. Clone this repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/marco.git
   cd marco
   

2. Navigate to the ML project folder where you want to train your model (e.g. your bag-of-words project):

   cd ~/projects/my-bag-of-words-model
   

3. Create and activate a Python Virtual Environment:

   # Create a virtual environment named 'venv'
   python3 -m venv venv
   
   # Activate it (You must do this every time you open a new terminal in this folder)
   source venv/bin/activate
   

   (You should now see (venv) at the start of your terminal prompt!)

4. Install Marco:

   # Point pip to the directory where you cloned the marco repository
   pip install -e /path/to/marco
   

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🛠️ Usage Guide

Once marco is installed in your virtual environment, you have access to the full CLI!

1. Initialize a Repository

Initialize Marco tracking in your current directory. This creates a .marco/ data versioning environment specific to that project.

marco init

2. Create an Immutable Version

Upload a text/CSV/TSV dataset to create an immutable version. Marco will compute a cryptographically secure SHA-256 hash using the raw data + the preprocessing configuration.

Interactive Mode: If you don't supply a configuration file, Marco will interactively guide you through building the preprocessing pipeline (Lowercasing, Tokenization, Stopwords Removal, Deduplicating).

marco upload my_dataset.csv -t v1-raw

Config Mode:

marco upload my_dataset.csv -c my_config.json -t v1-processed

3. List Versions

View all the versions you've created, along with their tags and timestamps.

marco list

4. Restore/Checkout Data

Extract the processed dataset from marco's storage back into your active workspace to use for model training.

marco restore v1-processed -o ./training_data.tsv

5. Start the Interactive Dashboard (New!)

Marco includes a stunning, built-in Glassmorphism React UI to visualize your dataset evolution.

marco generate-web

(This will automatically open your browser to http://localhost:7654 and load your .marco repository).

Dashboard Features:

• Interactive Lineage Tree: View the exact Git-style chronological history of your datasets in a visual tree.
• Auto-Compare Mode: Clicking any dataset instantly fetches its parent and calculates how the data changed (e.g. "+16% tokens", "-5% documents").
• Red/Green DAG Tracking: The visual graph highlights process nodes in explicitly color-coded borders (red for token increases, green for token drops) so you can track metric divergence intuitively.
• Alias Tagging: Your custom -t tags (like v1-raw) are beautifully serialized as badges in the UI so you never lose track of hashes.

6. Export / Import Versions

Easily share dataset versions with teammates by packing them into .tar.gz files.

# Export version 'v1-raw' to the 'exports' folder
marco export v1-raw ./exports/

# Import an archive sent to you by a coworker
marco import ./exports/marco_version_e5e0b767.tar.gz

7. Delete Versions

Delete a dataset version to recover disk space. Marco intelligently updates the lineage (the parents history) of any descendant versions so that your Git-style history tree remains intact and unbroken.

marco delete v1-raw
# or
marco rm e5e0b767

8. KL Divergence & Token Analytics

Marco goes beyond simple vocabulary size tracking. It utilizes mathematical KL divergence (Kullback-Leibler) to map exactly how distribution probability shifts between two dataset versions. This tells you what kind of change happened — determining instantly if common words disappeared or rare domain terms suddenly dominated.

You can instantly compute this distribution delta by passing two version directories natively to the module:

python -m marco.token_analytics path/to/v1 path/to/v2

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🧠 Architecture Overview

Marco decouples logic from the file system. All core engine operations sit inside marco/core/, including:

• locker.py: File-based concurrency control using .lock files.
• repository.py: CRUD operations for dataset versions and refs.json tagging.
• preprocessor.py: A robust Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) preprocessing engine.

Have fun building safer machine learning pipelines!