How-to guides

How-to guides answer a specific job you already know you want to do. They assume you have finished Quickstart so that the package installs cleanly and the stage names in the logs are familiar. If you have never run ARCADE at all, return to Quickstart first, then come back here with a concrete goal.

Each page below is procedural. It tells you which YAML keys to set, which commands to run, and what artifact to inspect when you finish. For design intent and metric definitions, open the sibling Explanation section under Guides in the sidebar, starting from Explanation guides.

• Compare classifiers
• Build your own classifier
• Enable optimization
• Enable QEC and FTQC curves

Choose a guide by goal

Goal	Guide
Rank methods on your own HDF5 under one frozen recipe	Compare classifiers
Build your own classifier, including a transformer-style custom class	Build your own classifier
Turn on pruning, distillation, NAS, quantization, or Optuna tuning	Enable optimization
Map classifier accuracy into logical error rate and cycle time	Enable QEC and FTQC curves

Build your own classifier

The Build your own classifier guide is the extension path. It shows how to register a class, how to point YAML at a registered name or a dotted import path, and how to plug a custom transformer into the same report as zoo baselines. Start from the nearest-mean toy if you only need filter features. Jump to the transformer section when your method needs time-resolved sequences.

When you need exact field names or registry strings, leave Guides and open the API Reference. When you want a paced first sitting rather than a job recipe, open Tutorials after you have skimmed Quickstart.