scikit-nni 0.1.1

Hyper parameters search for scikit-learn components using Microsoft NNI

scikit-nni

Hyper parameters search for scikit-learn components using Microsoft NNI

• Free software: Apache Software License 2.0

• Documentation: https://scikit-nni.readthedocs.io.

Features

• Hyperparameters search for scikit-learn pipelines using Microsoft NNI

• No code required to define the pipelines

• Builtin datasource reader for reading npz files for classification

• Support for using custom datasource reader

• Single configuration file to define NNI configuration and search space

I plan to add more datasource readers (e.g. CSV, libSVM format files etc). Contributions are always welcome !

Usage

Step 1 - Write specification file

The specification file is essentially a YAML file but with extension .nni.yml

There are 4 parts (sections) in the configuration file.

Datasource Section

This is where you will specify the (python) callable that sknni would invoking to the training and test dataset.

The callable should return 2 values where each value is a tuple of two items. The first tuple consists of training data (X_train, y_train) and the second tuple consists of test data (X_test, y_test).

An example callable would look like this:

import numpy as np

from sklearn.datasets import load_digits
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

class ACustomDataSource(object):
    def __init__(self):
        pass

    def __call__(self, test_size:float=0.25):
        digits = load_digits()
        X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(digits.data, digits.target, random_state=99, test_size=test_size)

        return (X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test)

In the above example, the callable generates the train and test dataset. The callable can even have paramaters for e.g. in this example you could optionally pass the fraction of data to be used for testing purposes.

Now let’s see how you would specify in the specification file.

# Datasource is how you specify which callable
# sknni will invoke to get the data
dataSource:
    reader: yourmodule.ACustomDataSource
    params:
        test_size: 0.30

Make sure that during the exeuction of the experiment your datasource (i.e. in this case yourmodule.ACustomDataSource) is available in the PYTHONPATH.

Here is an additional example showing the usage of an built-in datasource reader

dataSource:
    reader: sknni.datasource.NpzClassificationSource
    params:
        dir_path: /Users/ksachdeva/Desktop/Dev/myoss/scikit-nni/examples/data/multiclass-classification

Pipline definition Section

Below is the example of the section. You simply specify the list of steps of your typical scikit-learn Pipeline.

Note - The sequence of steps is very important.

What you MUST ensure is that the full qualified name of your scikit-learn preprocessors, transformers and estimators is correctly specified. sknni uses reflection and introspection to create the instances so if you have a typo in the names and/or they are not available in your PYTHONPATH you will get an error at experiment execution time.

sklearnPipeline:
    name: normalizer_svc
    steps:
        normalizer: sklearn.preprocessing.Normalizer
        svc: sklearn.svm.SVC

In above example, there are 2 steps. The first step is to normalize the data and the second step is train a classifier using Support Vector Machine.

Search Space Section

This section corresponds to the search space for your hyperparameters. When you `nnictrl` this is typically specified in search-space.json file.

Here are the important things to note about this section -

• The syntax is the same (except we are using YAML here instead of JSON) for specifiying parameter types and ranges.

• You MUST specifiy the parameters corresponding to the step in your scikit pipeline.

• You MUST use the names of the parameters that are same as the ones accepted by scikit-learn components (i.e. preprocessors, estimators etc).

Below is an example of this section.

nniConfigSearchSpace:
    - normalizer:
        norm:
            _type: choice
            _value: [l2, l1]
    - svc:
        C:
            _type: uniform
            _value: [0.1,0.0]
        kernel:
            _type: choice
            _value: [linear,rbf,poly,sigmoid]
        degree:
            _type: choice
            _value: [1,2,3,4]
        gamma:
            _type: uniform
            _value: [0.01,0.1]
        coef0:
            _type: uniform
            _value: [0.01,0.1]

Note that sklearn.svm.SVC takes C, kernel, degree, gamman and coef0 is the paramaters and hence we have used here the same names (keys) in the search space specification. You can add as many or as little parameters to search for.

NNI Config Section

This is the simplest of all sections as there is nothing new here from sknni perspective. You just copy-paste here your NNI’s config.yaml here. You do not have to specify codedir and command field in the trial subsection as this is added by the sknni in the generated configuration files.

Here is an example.

# This is exactly same as the one that of NNI
# except that you do not have to specify the command
# and code fields. They are automatically added by the sknni generator
nniConfig:
    authorName: default
    experimentName: example_sklearn-classification
    trialConcurrency: 1
    maxExecDuration: 1h
    maxTrialNum: 100
    trainingServicePlatform: local
    useAnnotation: false
    tuner:
        builtinTunerName: TPE
        classArgs:
            optimize_mode: maximize
    trial:
        gpuNum: 0

You can look at the various examples in the repository to learn how to define your own specification file.

Step 2 - Generate your experiment

sknni generate-experiment --spec example/basic_svc.nni.yml --output-dir experiments

Above command will create a directory experiments/svc-classification will following files

• The original specification file i.e. basic_svc.nni.yml (used during experiment run as well)

• Generated Microsoft NNI’s config.yml

• Generated Microsoft NNI’s search-space.json

Step 3 - Run your experiment

This is same as running nnitctl

nnictl create --config experiments/svc-classification/config.yml

Credits

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.

History

0.1.1 (2019-10-20)

• First release on PyPI.