Run Setup

By: Jan N. van Rijn

One of the key features of the openml-python library is that is allows to reinstantiate flows with hyperparameter settings that were uploaded before. This tutorial uses the concept of setups. Although setups are not extensively described in the OpenML documentation (because most users will not directly use them), they form a important concept within OpenML distinguishing between hyperparameter configurations. A setup is the combination of a flow with all its hyperparameters set.

A key requirement for reinstantiating a flow is to have the same scikit-learn version as the flow that was uploaded. However, this tutorial will upload the flow (that will later be reinstantiated) itself, so it can be ran with any scikit-learn version that is supported by this library. In this case, the requirement of the corresponding scikit-learn versions is automatically met.

In this tutorial we will

1. Create a flow and use it to solve a task;

2. Download the flow, reinstantiate the model with same hyperparameters, and solve the same task again;

3. We will verify that the obtained results are exactly the same.

# License: BSD 3-Clause

import numpy as np
import openml
from openml.extensions.sklearn import cat, cont

from sklearn.pipeline import make_pipeline, Pipeline
from sklearn.compose import ColumnTransformer
from sklearn.impute import SimpleImputer
from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder, FunctionTransformer
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
from sklearn.decomposition import TruncatedSVD

Warning

This example uploads data. For that reason, this example connects to the test server at test.openml.org. This prevents the main server from crowding with example datasets, tasks, runs, and so on. The use of this test server can affect behaviour and performance of the OpenML-Python API.

openml.config.start_using_configuration_for_example()

/home/runner/work/openml-python/openml-python/examples/30_extended/run_setup_tutorial.py:45: UserWarning: Switching to the test server https://test.openml.org/api/v1/xml to not upload results to the live server. Using the test server may result in reduced performance of the API!
  openml.config.start_using_configuration_for_example()

1) Create a flow and use it to solve a task

# first, let's download the task that we are interested in
task = openml.tasks.get_task(6)


# we will create a fairly complex model, with many preprocessing components and
# many potential hyperparameters. Of course, the model can be as complex and as
# easy as you want it to be


cat_imp = make_pipeline(
    OneHotEncoder(handle_unknown="ignore"),
    TruncatedSVD(),
)
cont_imp = SimpleImputer(strategy="median")
ct = ColumnTransformer([("cat", cat_imp, cat), ("cont", cont_imp, cont)])
model_original = Pipeline(
    steps=[
        ("transform", ct),
        ("estimator", RandomForestClassifier()),
    ]
)

# Let's change some hyperparameters. Of course, in any good application we
# would tune them using, e.g., Random Search or Bayesian Optimization, but for
# the purpose of this tutorial we set them to some specific values that might
# or might not be optimal
hyperparameters_original = {
    "estimator__criterion": "gini",
    "estimator__n_estimators": 50,
    "estimator__max_depth": 10,
    "estimator__min_samples_leaf": 1,
}
model_original.set_params(**hyperparameters_original)

# solve the task and upload the result (this implicitly creates the flow)
run = openml.runs.run_model_on_task(model_original, task, avoid_duplicate_runs=False)
run_original = run.publish()  # this implicitly uploads the flow

/home/runner/work/openml-python/openml-python/openml/runs/functions.py:792: UserWarning: Estimator only predicted for 5/6 classes!
  ) = extension._run_model_on_fold(

2) Download the flow and solve the same task again.

# obtain setup id (note that the setup id is assigned by the OpenML server -
# therefore it was not yet available in our local copy of the run)
run_downloaded = openml.runs.get_run(run_original.run_id)
setup_id = run_downloaded.setup_id

# after this, we can easily reinstantiate the model
model_duplicate = openml.setups.initialize_model(setup_id)
# it will automatically have all the hyperparameters set

# and run the task again
run_duplicate = openml.runs.run_model_on_task(model_duplicate, task, avoid_duplicate_runs=False)

/home/runner/work/openml-python/openml-python/openml/runs/functions.py:792: UserWarning: Estimator only predicted for 5/6 classes!
  ) = extension._run_model_on_fold(

3) We will verify that the obtained results are exactly the same.

# the run has stored all predictions in the field data content
np.testing.assert_array_equal(run_original.data_content, run_duplicate.data_content)

openml.config.stop_using_configuration_for_example()