[GENERAL SUPPORT]: Remove completed trial from experiment

[claysmyth]

Question

Is there a means to remove a trial from an experiment?

I.e. something along the lines of:

ax_client.remove_trial(trial_index=index)

Basically the opposite of ax_client.attach_trial().

I scoured the documentation and could not find a clean solution. A potential work-around would be to save the experiment to json, and manually delete the desired trials from the json file, and load in the new json. Please let me know if I am missing something!

For context on motivation - I'm using Ax for real world (e.g. biological) experiments, and occasionally observations are made on corrupted data or invalid trials, but still get logged to the experiment object. To retroactively remove trials known to be bad would be a convenient feature!

Sincerely,
Clay Smyth

Please provide any relevant code snippet if applicable.

Code of Conduct

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[mgrange1998]

Hi Clay, thanks for using Ax and for opening this issue!

What you are looking for is the ABANDONED trial state. The difference between FAILED and ABANDONED is trials can be retried by the experiment, whereas ABANDONED trials will not be retried. See here for more details.

So if you are intending for the corrupted/invalid trials to not be retried and be disregarded from the experiment, you can use "AxClient.abandon_trial"