exp apply

Put the results from an experiment in the workspace.

Synopsis

usage: dvc exp apply [-h] [-q | -v] [--no-force] experiment

positional arguments:
  experiment     Experiment to be applied

Description

Restores an experiment into the workspace, as long as we're on the same project baseline (Git HEAD) as when the target experiment was run. The experiment can be referenced by name or hash (see dvc exp run for details).

Specifically, dvc exp apply restores any files or directories needed to reflect the experiment conditions and results. This means checking out files tracked both with DVC and Git: code, raw data, parameters, metrics, resulting artifacts, etc.

⚠️ Conflicting changes in the workspace are overwritten unless --no-force is used.

This is typically used after choosing a target experiment with dvc exp show or dvc exp diff, and before committing it to Git (making it persistent.

Note that any checkpoints found in the experiment will not be preserved when applying and committing it. Use dvc exp branch instead.

Options

--no-force - fail if this command would overwrite conflicting differences between the experiment and the workspace.
-h, --help - shows the help message and exit.
-q, --quiet - do not write anything to standard output. Exit with 0 if no problems arise, otherwise 1.
-v, --verbose - displays detailed tracing information from executing the dvc pull command.

Example: Make an experiment persistent

This example is based on our Get Started, where you can find the actual source code.

Let's say we have run 3 experiments in our project:

$ dvc exp show

 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**               neutral:**Created**            metric:**auc**   param:**featurize.max_features**   param:**featurize.ngrams**
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace                -              0.61314   1500                     2
  10-bigrams-experiment    Jun 20, 2020   0.61314   1500                     2
  ├── gluey-leak           Oct 21, 2020   0.69830   2000                     2
  ├── frank-farm           Oct 09, 2020   0.57756   1200                     2
  └── union-mart           Oct 09, 2020   0.51676   500                      2
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Since gluey-leak has the best auc, we may want to commit it into our project (this is what we call to "make it persistent"):

$ dvc exp apply gluey-leak
Changes for experiment 'gluey-leak' have been applied...

We can inspect what changed in the workspace with Git,

$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
        modified:   dvc.lock
        modified:   params.yaml
        modified:   scores.json
$ git diff params.yaml

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ prepare:
 featurize:
-  max_features: 1500
+  max_features: 2000
   ngrams: 2

and with DVC:

$ dvc status
Data and pipelines are up to date.
$ dvc diff
Modified:
    data/features/
    data/features/test.pkl
    data/features/train.pkl
    model.pkl
files summary: 0 added, 0 deleted, 3 modified, 0 not in cache

To finish making this experiment persistent, we commit the changes to the repo:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "persist gluey-leak"

We can now see that the experiment is the new tip of our master branch:

$ dvc exp show

 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**   neutral:**Created**        metric:**auc**   param:**featurize.max_features**   param:**featurize.ngrams**
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace    -          0.69830   2000                     2
  master       04:31 PM   0.69830   2000                     2
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────