Implement NormalIntegerHyperparameter, NormalFloatHyperparameter and other distributions

[KOLANICH]

Efficiently. I already have an inefficient implementation, feel free to reuse it, but it is damn inefficient (probes the same points multiple times).

[mlindauer]

Dear @KOLANICH ,

Thank you for this proposal. It is also on our agenda for quite some time, but we have not implemented it so far.

Since this feature request does not belong to our SMAC package but to our configspace (https://github.com/automl/ConfigSpace), I will close this ticket here.

[KOLANICH]

Since this feature request does not belong to our SMAC package, but to our configspace .

They seem to be already implemented there (at least Normal), aren't they? It is SMAC which doesn't support them.

[mlindauer]

@mfeurer could you please reply to it.

[mfeurer]

@KOLANICH is correct, they are implemented in the ConfigSpace package but not in the SMAC package.

[mlindauer]

@mfeurer could you please remind of the reason why it is not implemented in SMAC?

[mfeurer]

• It is not implemented in the original SMAC package and not compatible with the pcs format.
• So far no one was interested in it.

I'd be happy to review pull requests on this, though.

[mlindauer]

@KOLANICH we will consider this request for our next SMAC release.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[renesass]

Since we drop the pcs format in v2.0 we could integrate this feature too. What do you think @mfeurer?

[mfeurer]

That sounds reasonable. Similarly, the beta-distributed hyperparameters could be used.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[benjamc]

Hi, we support the following hyperparameter types now:

UniformFloatHyperparameter,
UniformIntegerHyperparameter,
OrdinalHyperparameter,
CategoricalHyperparameter,
NormalFloatHyperparameter,
NormalIntegerHyperparameter,
BetaFloatHyperparameter,
BetaIntegerHyperparameter,

.However, NormalFloatHyperparameter, NormalIntegerHyperparameter, BetaFloatHyperparameter, BetaIntegerHyperparameter cannot be inactive, i.e. they cannot be used with conditions as for now.

[KOLANICH]

Thanks to everyone who was involved in implementing this :+1:. I cannot test it right now because I'm a bit occupied with other urgent work, so no ETA when the SMAC3 backend for UniOpt is ready.