Persisting Experiments
DVC Experiments run outside of the regular Git workflow for faster iteration and to avoid polluting your repository's history. Once experiments are good enough to keep or distribute, you may want to store them persistently as Git commits.
Create a Git branch from an experiment
You can use dvc exp branch
to create a new branch from an experiment, and keep
all its code and artifacts separate from your current workspace.
$ dvc exp show
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Experiment Created auc my_param
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
workspace - 0.61314 3
new-experiments Oct 19, 2020 0.61314 3
├── ochre-dook Oct 20, 2020 0.69830 2
└── matte-vies Oct 22, 2020 0.51676 1
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Suppose you want to continue to work on ochre-dook
in a separate branch. You
can create a new Git branch by specifying the experiment and giving a new name
for it:
$ dvc exp branch ochre-dook
Git branch 'ochre-dook-branch' has been created from experiment 'ochre-dook'.
Note that DVC doesn't switch to the new branch. You can create one or more branches from the existing experiments, and switch into any one manually like this:
$ git checkout ochre-dook-branch
$ dvc checkout
Your workspace now contains all the files from the experiment.
Bring experiment results to your workspace
Typically, dvc exp run
and dvc exp save
leave the experiment results in your
workspace for convenience. However, you may have run multiple experiments and
wish to go back to a specific one. In this case, you can restore a previous
experiment's results with dvc exp apply
. Let's see an example:
$ dvc exp show
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Experiment Created auc my_param
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
workspace - 0.61314 3
new-experiments Oct 19, 2020 0.61314 3
├── ochre-dook Oct 20, 2020 0.69830 2
└── matte-vies Oct 22, 2020 0.51676 1
─── ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The results found in the workspace are shown in the respective row. When you want to bring another experiment to the workspace, you can reference it using it's name, e.g.:
$ dvc exp apply ochre-dook
Changes for experiment 'ochre-dook' have been applied...
⚠️ Conflicting changes in the workspace are overwritten unless --no-force
is
used.
Note that
dvc exp apply
requires your project version (GitHEAD
) to be the same as when the experiment was run.
Now, if you list the experiments again with dvc exp show
, you'll see that the
workspace contains the results of ochre-dook
.
You can use standard Git commands (e.g. git add/commit/push
) to version 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.