I want to implement a boosted decision tree for my analysis. But the entries in my array contain are of varying length, so the array is not convertible directly into numpy or pandas.
Is there any way to use existing ML libraries with awkward array?
Your ML library might assume that the arrays are NumPy arrays and not recognize an ak.Array. That problem, in itself, is easily solved: call np.to_numpy (or equivalently, cast it with np.asarray) to put it in a form the ML library expects. Incidentally, there's also ak.to_pandas to make a DataFrame in which variable-length nested lists are represented by a MultiIndex (with limitations: there has to be only one nested list, since a DataFrame has only one index).
The above is what I'd call a "branding" issue: the ML library just doesn't recognize the ak.Array "brand" of array, so we relabel it. But there's a more fundamental issue: does the ML algorithm in question intrinsically require rectilinear data? For instance, a feedforward neural network maps N-dimensional inputs to M-dimensional outputs; N and M can't be different for each input. This is a problem even if you're not using Awkward Array. In HEP, the old solution was to run variable-length data through a recurrent neural network (thus ignoring the boundaries between lists and imposing an irrelevant order on them) and the new solution seems to be graph neural networks (which is a more theoretically correct thing to do).
I've noticed that some ML libraries are introducing their own "jagged arrays," which are the minimum structure that Awkward Array provides: TensorFlow has RaggedTensors and PyTorch is getting NestedTensors. I don't know to what degree these data types have been integrated into the ML algorithms, though. If they have been, then Awkward Array ought to get an ak.to_tensorflow and ak.to_pytorch to complement ak.to_numpy and ak.to_pandas, as a way to preserve jaggedness when sending data to these libraries. Hopefully, they'll be able to use that jaggedness in their ML algorithms! (Otherwise, what's the point? But I haven't been following these developments closely.)
You're interested in boosted decision trees (BDTs). I can't think of how a decision tree model, boosted or not, could be adapted to different length inputs... Or maybe I can: the nodes of a decision tree choose which subtree to pass the data down to based on the value of one index in the N-dimensional input. That doesn't imply there's a maximum index value N, though a particular tree would have a set of indexes that it splits on, and there would be some maximum of that set (because the tree is finite!). Apply a tree that wants to split on index k on an input with n < k elements would have to have a contingency for how to split anyway, but there are already methods for applying decision trees to datasets with missing values. An input datum with n elements could be treated as an input for which indexes greater than n are considered missing values. To train such a BDT, you'd have to give it inputs with missing values beyond each list's maximum element.
In Awkward Array, the function for that is ak.pad_none. If you know the maximum length list in your sample (ak.num and ak.max), you can pad the whole array such that all lists have the same length with missing values at the end. If you set clip=True, then the resulting array type is "regular," it no longer considers the possibility that a list can have a length different from the chosen length. If you pass such an array to np.to_numpy (and not np.asarray), then it becomes a NumPy masked array, which a BDT algorithm that expects missing values should be able to recognize.
The only problem with this plan is that padding every list to have the same length as the maximum length list uses more memory. If the BDT algorithm were aware of jaggedness (the way that TensorFlow and soon PyTorch is/will be aware of jaggedness), then it should be able to make these trees and apply them to data without the memory-padding step. I don't know if there are any such BDT implementations out there, but if someone wants to write a "BDT with missing values that accepts jagged arrays," I'd be happy to help them get it set up with Awkward Arrays!