Odd path in installing interpret with mamba

[bgalvao]

I am building a docker image and one of the commands lists interpret like this

RUN mamba install -c interpretml interpret -y

I take it this context is equivalent to installing interpret in local machine with a conda command.

To my surprise, I could not import interpret at first, resulting in a ModuleNotFoundError. So as to solve this, I tried to find where interpret could have been installed.

bernardo@42c160b2fb35:/opt/conda$ find . -type d -name '*interpret*'
./share/jupyter/lab/staging/node_modules/interpret
./Lib/site-packages/interpret-0.2.4.dist-info
./Lib/site-packages/interpret_core-0.2.4.dist-info
./Lib/site-packages/interpret  # this is where it is installed

interpret is the only package present in that path, which feels odd... So python looks for packages in the paths specified in sys.path

['/home/bernardo',
 '/opt/conda/lib/python39.zip',
 '/opt/conda/lib/python3.9',
 '/opt/conda/lib/python3.9/lib-dynload',
 '',
 '/opt/conda/lib/python3.9/site-packages'
]

The path /opt/conda/Lib/site-packages, where interpret is installed, is not listed.

I solved the problem by sys.path.append( '/opt/conda/Lib/site-packages'), but this is obviously a hack.

[MarcelPa]

I can confirm the same happens with 'pure conda'. Also, the version is older by quite a bit compared to an installation with pip.

A very lazy workaround to use as much conda as possible (for the dependencies) could be pip. You could install it like this:

$ conda create -n interpretml
$ conda activate interpretml
(interpretml) $ conda install -c conda-forge -c interpretml interpret
(interpretml) $ pip install interpret
(interpretml) $ python -c 'import interpret; print(interpret.__version__)'
0.2.7

This installs interpret twice in two different versions!

$ find .conda/envs/interpretml -type d -name 'interpret*'
.conda/envs/interpretml
.conda/envs/interpretml/lib/python3.10/site-packages/interpret
.conda/envs/interpretml/lib/python3.10/site-packages/interpret_core-0.2.7.dist-info
.conda/envs/interpretml/lib/python3.10/site-packages/interpret-0.2.7.dist-info
.conda/envs/interpretml/Lib/site-packages/interpret
.conda/envs/interpretml/Lib/site-packages/interpret_core-0.2.4.dist-info
.conda/envs/interpretml/Lib/site-packages/interpret-0.2.4.dist-info

Not perfect, but functional.

[paulbkoch]

Thanks @bgalvao and @MarcelPa -- We now have a conda-forge package (https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/interpret). Install with:

conda install -c conda-forge interpret