Reproducibility

Learn how to create reproducible computing environments using docker and how to use them to run your code.

M10: Docker
Learn how to use hydra to manage configuration files and how to integrate it with your code.

M11: Config Files

Today is all about reproducibility - one of those concepts that everyone agrees is very important and something should be done about, but the reality is that it is very hard to secure full reproducibility. The last sessions have already touched a bit on how tools like conda and code organization can help make code more reproducible. Today we are going all the way to ensure that our scripts and our computing environment are fully reproducible.

Why does reproducibility matter

Reproducibility is closely related to the scientific method:

Observe -> Question -> Hypotheses -> Experiment -> Conclude -> Result -> Observe -> ...

Not having reproducible experiments essentially breaks the cycle between doing experiments and making conclusions. If experiments are not reproducible, then we do not expect that others will arrive at the same conclusion as ourselves. As machine learning experiments are fundamentally the same as doing chemical experiments in a laboratory, we should be equally careful in making sure our environments are reproducible (think of your laptop as your laboratory).

Secondly, if we focus on why reproducibility matters especially in machine learning, it is part of the bigger challenge of making sure that machine learning is trustworthy.

Many different aspects are needed if trustworthy machine learning is ever going to be a reality. We need robustness of our pipelines so we can trust that they do not fail under heavy load. We need integrity to make sure that pipelines are deployed if they are of high quality. We need explainability to make sure that we understand what our machine learning models are doing, so it is not just a black box. We need reproducibility to make sure that the results of our models can be reproduced over and over again. Finally, we need fairness to make sure that our models are not biased toward specific populations. Figure inspired by this paper.

Trustworthy ML is the idea that machine learning agents can be trusted. Take the example of a machine learning agent being responsible for medical diagnoses. It is very clear that we need to be able to trust that the agent gives us the correct diagnosis for the system to work in practice. Reproducibility plays a big role here, because without we cannot be sure that the same agent deployed at two different hospitals will give the same diagnosis (given the same input).

Learning objectives

The learning objectives of this session are:

To understand the importance of reproducibility in computer science
To be able to use docker to create a reproducible container, including how to build them from scratch
Understand different ways of configuring your code and how to use hydra to integrate with config files