Add Plots for numeric ValueHistories

[Evizero]

No description provided.

[tbreloff]

I'd really like to avoid adding dependencies, unless absolutely necessary. There are a few options... one of them is simply wrapping the include in a try block, so that if the user doesn't have the package it just doesn't include this functionality. Then we don't have to add it to the REQUIRE file.

[Evizero]

Not sure that I have seen that before. Do you have some example code?

[tbreloff]

Did you review whether these can be implemented as PlotRecipes? You really shouldn't have to ever implement a plot or plot! method, as then you bypass lots of built-in functionality. Worst case, you may want to implement a Plots.createKWargsList method (I should really change that ugly name). I can help with either implementation, check out this recipe for an example of how you might attempt this.

[Evizero]

Wouldn't that require everything I pass to plot to be a subtype of PlotRecipe (which kinda defies the purpose)? Or is is duck-typing in the sense that I only really have to implement getRecipeXY(mycustomobject) and getRecipeArgs(mycustomobject)

The goal I have is to be able to use plot(mycustomobject) with the typical kw-args or specialized further positional args. Do PlotRecipes allow me to do that?

[tbreloff]

Let me think through this a little more, and I'll come back with what I would do.

[Evizero]

try it on the loss plots, which are a little more complicated as I would like to support something along the line of plot(loss) (which uses a default range) and plot(loss, -2, 2)

[tbreloff]

Ok I'll put together an IJulia notebook, and I might make some code changes
in Plots to support it better.

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Christof Stocker <notifications@github.com

wrote:

try it on the loss plots, which are a little more complicated as I would
like to support something along the line of plot(loss) (which uses a
default range) and plot(loss, -2, 2)

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#5 (comment).

[tbreloff]

Here's a possibility (you'll need to checkout dev to try it out):

[tbreloff]

Also you could make a small adjustment for the subplot case, which sets the titles instead of the labels if you have 1 loss per plot:

function Plots._apply_recipe{L<:Loss}(d::Dict, losses::AbstractVector{L}; kw...)
    ...
    if get(d, :n, 0) == length(losses)
        d[:legend] = false
        d[:title] = d[:label]
    end
    ...
end

[Evizero]

That seems cool! One question. How would I implement the functionality that allows plot(myloss, -3, 3) ?

I would guess:
Plots._apply_recipe{L<:Loss}(d::Dict, losses::AbstractVector{L}, x1::Real, x2::Real; kw...) ?

[tbreloff]

Sure that would work. And any variation of it, as long as the types aren't too generic. Just keep in mind... if you did something like:

Plots._apply_recipe(d::Dict, x::Vector{Float64}; kw...) = ...

then it would seriously break things since all float vectors would now pass through your recipe code. For custom types this shouldn't be an issue.

[Evizero]

Ok nice. I'll give it a shot. One concern though. Will d[:legend] = false just overwrite the defaults, or will it force the values to be this way no matter what the user specifies using the KWs. Because what we really want is to specify custom default values for title etc which the user can overwrite using the usual KWs

[tbreloff]

That's up to you... the kw... is what the user put there, and d should be the same as kw, but after some preprocessing. You could do something like d[:legend] = get(d, :legend, false), which I think will do what you want. This should use the existing value, or add your default value if the user didn't set it.

[Evizero]

new problem. Let's take an SVM classification plot for example where I want to do plot(trained_svm). I would need to plot some contours, then some points, then the support vectors, and then maybe a line. How would I approach that without overloading plot?

[tbreloff]

Can you post the code (or a gist) with a full example? Then I can help create the matching function.

But generally, you can set arg/d with the same tricks you would normally. Notice that in the 2nd _apply_recipe above, I'm creating multiple series all at once by:

• returning a tuple: (Vector{Function}, Real, Real)
• setting xlabel/label/title to be a 1-row matrix of values, where columns map to each series

So you can get creative... d[:linetype] = [:contour :scatter :path], etc

[Evizero]

so I am trying to change to this approach and I am getting a weird error

function Plots._apply_recipe{I,V<:Real}(d::Dict, h::VectorUnivalueHistory{I,V}; kw...)
    d[:marker] = get(d, :marker, (:ellipse, 1.5))
    d[:legend] = get(d, :legend, false)
    get(h) # Tuple{Array{Int64,1},Array{Float64,1}}
end

ERROR: Unknown key: marker
 in default at /home/csto/.julia/v0.4/Plots/src/args.jl:324
 in warnOnUnsupportedArgs at /home/csto/.julia/v0.4/Plots/src/args.jl:579
 in plot! at /home/csto/.julia/v0.4/Plots/src/plot.jl:87
 in plot at /home/csto/.julia/v0.4/Plots/src/plot.jl:56

[Evizero]

Are you sure you want to go this direction of having this custom way to define new plots? It feels really strange. overloading plot feels much more intuitive and flexible for complicated plots which one could then build up incrementally

[tbreloff]

ERROR: Unknown key: marker

The _apply_recipe method is called after argument preprocessing, which is where the "magic args" like :marker are handled. So you would need to be explicit in setting the individual args:

d[:markershape] = :ellipse
d[:markersize] = 1.5
...

Are you sure you want to go this direction of having this custom way to define new plots?

I'm pretty sure that it's a bad idea to overload plot, plot!, and all the variations of subplot/subplot! (probably 5-6 methods per recipe) just so you can make a familiar call to plot in the function. I think the _apply_recipe method is very straightforward once you understand the rules.

Also remember that your average user won't be creating recipes (or at least, not right away) so it can be slightly less intuitive while saving tons of repeated (and error prone) code.

[Evizero]

So I gave it a shot. Let me know what you think.

Any ideas how I could infer n for the subplots based on my history? So that the user doesn't need to know how many subplots are needed.

subplot(history)

ERROR: You must specify either layout or n when creating a subplot: Dict{Any,Any}()
 in subplot at /home/csto/.julia/v0.4/Plots/src/subplot.jl:166

[tbreloff]

Pull the latest dev branch, and you'll be able to do something like this:

function Plots._apply_recipe{L<:Loss}(d::Dict, losses::AbstractVector{L}; issubplot=false, kw...)
    d[:xlabel] = map(_loss_xlabel, losses)'
    d[:ylabel] = "L(y, h(x))"
    d[:label] = map(string, losses)'
    if issubplot
        n = get!(d, :n, length(losses))
        if n == length(losses)
            d[:legend] = false
            d[:title] = d[:label]
        end
    end
    map(value_fun, losses), -2, 2
end

Note: the issubplot arg in the signature is optional... only include it if you need to.

If the user sets n, it uses that. Otherwise I'm setting it to the length of losses.

[tbreloff]

This seems like it should be:

_filter_plotable_histories(h::DynMultivalueHistory) = filter((k,v) -> _is_plotable_history(v), h.storage)

[tbreloff]

I'm happy to merge what you have so far, and we can fix/fine-tune what we need to later.

Also with regards to testing... I'm working on releasing a new package https://github.com/tbreloff/VisualRegressionTests.jl which will contain a generalized version of the regression testing that I'm doing in Plots currently. When that's ready to go we should build some examples which incorporate the plots we're building here, and run them as part of the travis testing. I'll get the framework setup... then you can add the tests for recipes that you add.

[tbreloff]

A quick side note... thanks to this PR, I changed the default _apply_recipe and now we don't have to specify n all the time. This works now:

subplot(rand(10,4))

Before it would error because of the missing n=4. Thanks!

[Evizero]

Nice. Don't merge just yet. I would like to add the proposed changes and also do a little monkey testing.

[Evizero]

get!(d, :markershape, :ellipse)
get!(d, :markersize, 1.5)

this works for plot but not for subplot

[tbreloff]

Can you open an issue? Sounds like a bug, but I'm not at my computer.

On Nov 24, 2015, at 5:59 PM, Christof Stocker notifications@github.com wrote:

get!(d, :markershape, :ellipse)
get!(d, :markersize, 1.5)
this works for plot but not for subplot

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[Evizero]

I moved the files into sub-folders and implemented your suggestions. I will adapt the loss function plots in a separate PR. I'm ok with merging this if you are.

concerning issue: yes sure, will do