Perrone et al. (2018)

A tutorial on how to build a surrogate model based on OpenML data as done for Scalable Hyperparameter Transfer Learning by Perrone et al..

Publication

Scalable Hyperparameter Transfer Learning
Valerio Perrone and Rodolphe Jenatton and Matthias Seeger and Cedric Archambeau
In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31, 2018

This example demonstrates how OpenML runs can be used to construct a surrogate model.

In the following section, we shall do the following:

  • Retrieve tasks and flows as used in the experiments by Perrone et al. (2018).

  • Build a tabular data by fetching the evaluations uploaded to OpenML.

  • Impute missing values and handle categorical data before building a Random Forest model that maps hyperparameter values to the area under curve score.

# License: BSD 3-Clause

import openml
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.impute import SimpleImputer
from sklearn.compose import ColumnTransformer
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor

flow_type = "svm"  # this example will use the smaller svm flow evaluations

The subsequent functions are defined to fetch tasks, flows, evaluations and preprocess them into a tabular format that can be used to build models.

def fetch_evaluations(run_full=False, flow_type="svm", metric="area_under_roc_curve"):
    """
    Fetch a list of evaluations based on the flows and tasks used in the experiments.

    Parameters
    ----------
    run_full : boolean
        If True, use the full list of tasks used in the paper
        If False, use 5 tasks with the smallest number of evaluations available
    flow_type : str, {'svm', 'xgboost'}
        To select whether svm or xgboost experiments are to be run
    metric : str
        The evaluation measure that is passed to openml.evaluations.list_evaluations

    Returns
    -------
    eval_df : dataframe
    task_ids : list
    flow_id : int
    """
    # Collecting task IDs as used by the experiments from the paper
    # fmt: off
    if flow_type == "svm" and run_full:
        task_ids = [
            10101, 145878, 146064, 14951, 34537, 3485, 3492, 3493, 3494,
            37, 3889, 3891, 3899, 3902, 3903, 3913, 3918, 3950, 9889,
            9914, 9946, 9952, 9967, 9971, 9976, 9978, 9980, 9983,
        ]
    elif flow_type == "svm" and not run_full:
        task_ids = [9983, 3485, 3902, 3903, 145878]
    elif flow_type == "xgboost" and run_full:
        task_ids = [
            10093, 10101, 125923, 145847, 145857, 145862, 145872, 145878,
            145953, 145972, 145976, 145979, 146064, 14951, 31, 3485,
            3492, 3493, 37, 3896, 3903, 3913, 3917, 3918, 3, 49, 9914,
            9946, 9952, 9967,
        ]
    else:  # flow_type == 'xgboost' and not run_full:
        task_ids = [3903, 37, 3485, 49, 3913]
    # fmt: on

    # Fetching the relevant flow
    flow_id = 5891 if flow_type == "svm" else 6767

    # Fetching evaluations
    eval_df = openml.evaluations.list_evaluations_setups(
        function=metric,
        tasks=task_ids,
        flows=[flow_id],
        uploaders=[2702],
        output_format="dataframe",
        parameters_in_separate_columns=True,
    )
    return eval_df, task_ids, flow_id


def create_table_from_evaluations(
    eval_df, flow_type="svm", run_count=np.iinfo(np.int64).max, task_ids=None
):
    """
    Create a tabular data with its ground truth from a dataframe of evaluations.
    Optionally, can filter out records based on task ids.

    Parameters
    ----------
    eval_df : dataframe
        Containing list of runs as obtained from list_evaluations()
    flow_type : str, {'svm', 'xgboost'}
        To select whether svm or xgboost experiments are to be run
    run_count : int
        Maximum size of the table created, or number of runs included in the table
    task_ids : list, (optional)
        List of integers specifying the tasks to be retained from the evaluations dataframe

    Returns
    -------
    eval_table : dataframe
    values : list
    """
    if task_ids is not None:
        eval_df = eval_df[eval_df["task_id"].isin(task_ids)]
    if flow_type == "svm":
        colnames = ["cost", "degree", "gamma", "kernel"]
    else:
        colnames = [
            "alpha",
            "booster",
            "colsample_bylevel",
            "colsample_bytree",
            "eta",
            "lambda",
            "max_depth",
            "min_child_weight",
            "nrounds",
            "subsample",
        ]
    eval_df = eval_df.sample(frac=1)  # shuffling rows
    eval_df = eval_df.iloc[:run_count, :]
    eval_df.columns = [column.split("_")[-1] for column in eval_df.columns]
    eval_table = eval_df.loc[:, colnames]
    value = eval_df.loc[:, "value"]
    return eval_table, value


def list_categorical_attributes(flow_type="svm"):
    if flow_type == "svm":
        return ["kernel"]
    return ["booster"]

Fetching the data from OpenML

Now, we read all the tasks and evaluations for them and collate into a table. Here, we are reading all the tasks and evaluations for the SVM flow and pre-processing all retrieved evaluations.

eval_df, task_ids, flow_id = fetch_evaluations(run_full=False, flow_type=flow_type)
X, y = create_table_from_evaluations(eval_df, flow_type=flow_type)
print(X.head())
print("Y : ", y[:5])
                     cost degree               gamma      kernel
2788   0.0096973496834202    NaN  0.0578944054181655         NaN
832      8.78405401075248    NaN                 NaN      linear
2790  0.00192816142597202    NaN   0.119516474663112         NaN
4716   0.0370568263088475      2                 NaN  polynomial
2720     58.6968740291414    NaN    15.0859704951219         NaN
Y :  2788    0.694552
832     0.956689
2790    0.689351
4716    0.755219
2720    0.644543
Name: value, dtype: float64

Creating pre-processing and modelling pipelines

The two primary tasks are to impute the missing values, that is, account for the hyperparameters that are not available with the runs from OpenML. And secondly, to handle categorical variables using One-hot encoding prior to modelling.

# Separating data into categorical and non-categorical (numeric for this example) columns
cat_cols = list_categorical_attributes(flow_type=flow_type)
num_cols = list(set(X.columns) - set(cat_cols))

# Missing value imputers for numeric columns
num_imputer = SimpleImputer(missing_values=np.nan, strategy="constant", fill_value=-1)

# Creating the one-hot encoder for numerical representation of categorical columns
enc = OneHotEncoder(handle_unknown="ignore")

# Combining column transformers
ct = ColumnTransformer([("cat", enc, cat_cols), ("num", num_imputer, num_cols)])

# Creating the full pipeline with the surrogate model
clf = RandomForestRegressor(n_estimators=50)
model = Pipeline(steps=[("preprocess", ct), ("surrogate", clf)])

Building a surrogate model on a task’s evaluation

The same set of functions can be used for a single task to retrieve a singular table which can be used for the surrogate model construction. We shall use the SVM flow here to keep execution time simple and quick.

# Selecting a task for the surrogate
task_id = task_ids[-1]
print("Task ID : ", task_id)
X, y = create_table_from_evaluations(eval_df, task_ids=[task_id], flow_type="svm")

model.fit(X, y)
y_pred = model.predict(X)

print("Training RMSE : {:.5}".format(mean_squared_error(y, y_pred)))
Task ID :  145878
Training RMSE : 1.265e-05

Evaluating the surrogate model

The surrogate model built from a task’s evaluations fetched from OpenML will be put into trivial action here, where we shall randomly sample configurations and observe the trajectory of the area under curve (auc) we can obtain from the surrogate we’ve built.

NOTE: This section is written exclusively for the SVM flow

# Sampling random configurations
def random_sample_configurations(num_samples=100):
    colnames = ["cost", "degree", "gamma", "kernel"]
    ranges = [
        (0.000986, 998.492437),
        (2.0, 5.0),
        (0.000988, 913.373845),
        (["linear", "polynomial", "radial", "sigmoid"]),
    ]
    X = pd.DataFrame(np.nan, index=range(num_samples), columns=colnames)
    for i in range(len(colnames)):
        if len(ranges[i]) == 2:
            col_val = np.random.uniform(low=ranges[i][0], high=ranges[i][1], size=num_samples)
        else:
            col_val = np.random.choice(ranges[i], size=num_samples)
        X.iloc[:, i] = col_val
    return X


configs = random_sample_configurations(num_samples=1000)
print(configs)
           cost    degree       gamma      kernel
0    986.019648  2.523967  147.114819      linear
1    539.231679  4.182628    5.172530  polynomial
2      9.863132  3.180964   37.654046  polynomial
3    464.223827  3.771305  870.536857      radial
4    707.971743  3.042699   62.174397     sigmoid
..          ...       ...         ...         ...
995   98.831403  4.546238  781.661562      linear
996  358.617132  3.501291  224.323675      radial
997  388.331655  2.147912  586.635093      radial
998  727.991448  3.905930  319.060032     sigmoid
999  727.556214  3.032426  362.145073  polynomial

[1000 rows x 4 columns]
preds = model.predict(configs)

# tracking the maximum AUC obtained over the functions evaluations
preds = np.maximum.accumulate(preds)
# computing regret (1 - predicted_auc)
regret = 1 - preds

# plotting the regret curve
plt.plot(regret)
plt.title("AUC regret for Random Search on surrogate")
plt.xlabel("Numbe of function evaluations")
plt.ylabel("Regret")
AUC regret for Random Search on surrogate
Text(33.972222222222214, 0.5, 'Regret')

Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 27.082 seconds)

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