Histree: A Tree-Based Experiment History Tracking Tool for Jupyter Notebooks

Proceedings - Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference/Proceedings, pp. 299–308

Abstract

When experimenting on solutions to Machine Learning problems, data scientists often integrate nonlinear workflows into Jupyter Notebooks to explore different approaches and evaluate the impact of changes such as using different Machine Learning models or adjusting parameters. This mode of working leads to Notebooks that are cluttered and difficult to navigate which complicates refining and reusing previous experiments later on. Jupyter Notebooks lack inherent support for such a mode of working. Therefore, we propose the JupyterLab extension HisTreethat provides an interactive tree-based representation of the experiment history in Jupyter Notebooks. Hereby, Note-book versions triggered by specified Notebook operations, are automatically saved and arranged in a tree structure. In this way, HisTreeallows data scientists to explore, compare, organize, and refine their past experiment approaches. In this paper, first, we introduce the concept of an experiment history tree model. This is followed by a comprehensive description of the functionality of HisTree,which aims to support data scientists in organizing experiments in Jupyter Notebooks. Initial feedback from user experiments shows that the tree-based experiment model is very promising and that the HisTreeextension is both useful and usable to conduct ML experiments in Jupyter Notebooks.

Authors 3

1. Laurens Studtmann Aachen Research Group Software Construction

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Selin Aydın Aachen Research Group Software Construction

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Horst Lichter Aachen Research Group Software Construction

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany