Where does Shogun suck in benchmarks?

[karlnapf]

This task is to find a systematic way to figure out the cases for which a library in the automated benchmarking system performs badly

• very slow (ranked last, or far from median)
• very memory intensive
• fails
• the focus here is (obviously) on Shogun, but a script that does that should be general (and contributed back to their project)

Contact @zoq and @rcurtin who have ideas how to do that.

(18:15:51) rcurtin: hmm, you could do this by postprocessing the SQL results
(18:15:57) rcurtin: I think it would be a fairly easy query too
(18:16:21) Heiko: could I make an entrance task for that and send people to you?
(18:16:29) rcurtin: the system can run and output results into an SQL database or into SQLite too, so it's easy to just grab a database and go to town with the sqlite3 db
(18:16:49) rcurtin: that would be fine, but definitely we should talk with Marcus and see what he thinks the interface for that should be
(18:17:07) rcurtin: like right now we kind of have a command-line interface to actually run the benchmarks, and some HTML/JS to view the results
(18:17:18) rcurtin: but this seems like something separate, a simple script to analyze results
(18:17:39) rcurtin: my initial inclination is that maybe this would fit well into some kind of new results/scripts/ directory, which can contain simple scripts to work with the results
(18:18:51) rcurtin: but maybe Marcus has a better idea
(18:19:09) rcurtin: and how to test the code to be submitted will be a little bit of an issue, we might need to set up some infrastructure for that

[karlnapf]

#4046

[rcurtin]

I would say a good place to start is to check out the benchmarking system, run it on a small dataset, and then produce an SQL query on the results that gives the desired information. After that we can figure out the right way to put this together into something that can be merged.

[zoq]

If somebody likes to work on the latests results, we can also provide an SQL dump.

[karlnapf]

(18:34:46) zoq: Agreed, a simple preprocessing script sounds like a good idea, at the end, it's just a simple SQL query.
(18:34:58) zoq: We could provide some simple scripts apart from the HTML/JS interface for the most common tasks.
(18:35:12) zoq: I guess you could also write a simple Jupiter notebook? I think you could provide some input on that?

[p16i]

Hi,

I've figured out a way to get the results through the mysql_wrapper.php.

curl -X POST \
  http://www.mlpack.org/php/mysql_wrapper.php \
  -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -H 'Postman-Token: 175a469b-31bd-4921-bd23-170d8b9e171a' \
  -d 'request=<QUERY>'

And <QUERY> is

SELECT
    *
FROM (
    SELECT
        libraries.name as lib,
        methods.name as name,
        datasets.name as dataset,
        results.time as time,
        results.var as var,
        libraries.id,
        datasets.id as did,
        libraries.id as lid,
        results.build_id as bid,
        datasets.instances as di,
        datasets.attributes as da,
        datasets.size as ds
    FROM results, datasets, methods, libraries
    WHERE
        results.dataset_id = datasets.id AND
        results.method_id = methods.id AND
        methods.parameters = '' AND
        libraries.id = results.libary_id AND
        libraries.name = 'shogun' AND
        results.time <= 0 # this can be remove if we want to get all results.
    ORDER BY bid DESC
) tmp;

Returned JSON:

[
    {
        "lib": "shogun",
        "name": "LinearRegression",
        "dataset": "diabetes",
        "time": "0",
        "var": "0",
        "id": "6",
        "did": "8",
        "lid": "6",
        "bid": "33",
        "di": "442",
        "da": "10",
        "ds": "0"
    },
    {
        "lib": "shogun",
        "name": "LinearRegression",
        "dataset": "cosExp",
        "time": "-2",
        "var": "0",
        "id": "6",
        "did": "9",
        "lid": "6",
        "bid": "33",
        "di": "200",
        "da": "800",
        "ds": "1"
    },
...
]

[zoq]

Nice solution, thanks for the input.

[p16i]

hi @zoq,

I'm a bit concerned about the API though. With this interface, one might directly send malicious queries to the DB.

I personally think we should find a better way to extract the result as well as making the API more restrict.

One way might be to generate benchmark results offline and write the results as JSON files. The frontend will just read those JSON files.

[zoq]

Actually, I was surprised you could send a query; only a specific IP should be able to do that. Do you think, that could be sufficient?

[p16i]

I was surprised too!

Can you elaborate a bit about your approach? If I understood correctly, you would allow only certain IPs to send the POST request to the server. If that's the case, the benchmark page will be functional on for those IPs, right?

[zoq]

Right, only the build/webserver would be able to send the POST, I think this is already the case, but since a user is able to run the php script the IP is correct, so I guess we could adapt the script.

[p16i]

Hi @zoq & @karlnapf,

Given the command I provided previously and current coverage in #4046 (comment), I think we basically have everything we need for this issue.

What else should we do for this issue?

[karlnapf]

But some shogun algos are uncovered, so how can we know how it performs?

[zoq]

It would be interesting to see in which case shogun is leading or is behind. The second case, could be a good starting point for further analysis.

[p16i]

I've also created an issue at mlpack's benchmarks (mlpack/benchmarks#133). It seems Shogun has an DTC algorithm but the benchmark report doesn't have the the result.

@zoq do you have any idea why that happens?