Reviewing and Comparing Experiments

Once you have saved several experiments, DVC provides commands to review, compare, and manage those experiments. Let's see how they can help you streamline the experimentation process.

Show a table of experiments

Experimentation is about generating many possibilities before selecting a few of them. You can get a table of experiments, which displays all the metrics (yellow), parameters (blue) and dependencies (violet) in a nicely formatted table.

$ dvc exp show

 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**              neutral:**Created**            metric:**loss**      metric:**acc**   param:**train.epochs**   param:**model.conv_units**   dep:**src**       dep:**data**
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace               -               0.03332   0.9888   10             16                 695e061   6875529
  baseline-experiment     Jan 14, 2022    0.03332   0.9888   10             16                 695e061   6875529
  ├── 38d6c53 [cnn-64]    Jan 19, 2022   0.038246    0.988   10             64                 c77a505   6875529
  └── bc0faf5 [cnn-128]   Jan 19, 2022   0.038325    0.989   10             128                bc75d6a   6875529
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Customize the table of experiments

The table output may become cluttered if you have a large number of metrics, parameters and dependencies. DVC provides several options to select the columns to be shown in the table.

$ dvc exp show --only-changed

 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**              neutral:**Created**            metric:**loss**      metric:**acc**    param:**model.conv_units**
 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace               -               0.03332   0.9888    16
  baseline-experiment     Jan 14, 2022    0.03332   0.9888    16
  ├── 38d6c53 [cnn-64]    Jan 19, 2022   0.038246    0.988    64
  └── bc0faf5 [cnn-128]   Jan 19, 2022   0.038325    0.989    128
 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Other ways to access the experiments table

If viewing the table isn't enough and you need programmatic access to the experiments table, you can save it as a CSV or access it using the Python API.

$ dvc exp show --csv

Experiment,rev,typ,Created,parent,loss,acc,train.epochs,model.conv_units
,workspace,baseline,,,0.236574187874794,0.9126999974250793,10,16
baseline-experiment,23ceb4a,baseline,2021-09-06T23:38:07,,0.236574187874794,0.9126999974250793,10,16
cnn-64,6d13f33,branch_commit,2021-09-09T13:06:05,,0.2338544875383377,0.9153000116348267,10,64
cnn-128,69503c6,branch_commit,2021-09-09T12:53:51,,0.2324332743883133,0.9160000085830688,10,128

$ dvc exp show --csv | csvstat
...
7. "acc"

        Type of data:          Number
        Contains null values:  False
        Unique values:         5
        Smallest value:        0.9127
        Largest value:         0.9167
        Sum:                   5.4895
        Mean:                  0.914917
        Median:                0.91565
        StDev:                 0.001774
        Most common values:    0.9127 (2x)
                               0.9167 (1x)
                               0.9153 (1x)
                               0.9161 (1x)
                               0.916 (1x)
...

import dvc.api

exps = dvc.api.exp_show()

[
  {
    "Experiment": "paled-acre",
    "rev": "883442c",
    "Created": "Apr 19, 2023",
    "dice_multi": 0.8590125166103912,
    "train.arch": "squeezenet1_1"
  },
  {
    "Experiment": "vocal-suer",
    "rev": "231e504",
    "Created": "Apr 19, 2023",
    "dice_multi": 0.8997336177828745,
    "train.arch": "resnet34"
  },
  {
    "Experiment": "banal-hogs",
    "rev": "ff4a08a",
    "Created": "Apr 19, 2023",
    "dice_multi": 0.8758231459806097,
    "train.arch": "alexnet"
  }
]

import dvc.api
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame(dvc.api.exp_show())

Compare plots

The experiments table compares scalar parameters and metrics. You can also save plots data from each exepriment and overlay plots from different experiments to compare them. Plots can include metrics trends, non-scalar data like ROC curves or histograms, and static images to compare. Get more info on visualizing plots and see the examples below for how to compare plots between experiments.

$ dvc plots diff $(dvc exp list --name-only)

Bring experiment results to your workspace

To inspect an experiment beyond what you can see in the table or plots (like inspecting code or data changes), you can restore a previous experiment's results to your workspace.

⚠️ Conflicting changes in the workspace are overwritten, but they can be recovered.

$ dvc exp apply ochre-dook
Changes for experiment 'ochre-dook' have been applied...

You can use standard Git commands (e.g. git add/commit/push) to persist this experiment directly in the repository. DVC-tracked data and artifacts are already in the DVC cache, and the rest (params, code and config files, etc.) can be stored in Git.

Note that you need to dvc push in order to share or backup the DVC cache contents.

Compare outside your workspace

The methods above let you compare experiments from your local machine where you are working without any servers, logins, or infrastructure. However, sometimes you are away from your machine, or you want to share the results with others. DVC Studio provides a web collaboration hub for sharing experiments and visualizing and comparing experiments for your entire project history.

Removing experiments

Although DVC uses minimal resources to keep track of the experiments, they may clutter tables and the workspace. When you want to discard experiments by their name, you can remove them.

Use dvc exp remove and supply the experiment name.

$ dvc exp list
main:
    2399f24 [cnn-128]
    4e8a178 [cnn-32]
    f1edf21 [cnn-64]
$ dvc exp remove cnn-32 cnn-64
Removed experiments: cnn-32,cnn-64

Removing an experiment does not delete any objects in the DVC cache. To remove the cache objects, e.g. model files, intermediate artifacts, etc. related with the experiments, you can use dvc gc.