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

 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**              neutral:**Created**            metric:**auc**   param:**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

 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**               neutral:**Created**            metric:**auc**   param:**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 (Git HEAD) 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.