create visualization plot for parameter optimization

[rythorpe]

[jasmainak]

@rythorpe this came up today. One of the issues with the optimization function is that it does not update net._params. I see users trying to access parameters through that. Is this attribute still needed?

Perhaps more urgently, we should have a simple function that extracts the optimized parameters from a network object and spits them out as a dictionary? So users can report in their publications what is the new parameters. This use case came up in a discussion today.

[rythorpe]

Yeah, that attribute is private for a reason ;-) Optimization doesn't touch that attribute, but rather modifies the specific drive attributes of the Network instance.

_get_drive_params() was designed with the intention of eventually becoming public so that users could extract the relevant optimized parameters.

[jasmainak]

I think the users ideally want just a flat dictionary ... is that returned by this function?

[rythorpe]

Nope, but the bones are there. We'll need to be thoughtful here about not recreating the whole .param file debacle as we want to provide user-facing parameters that have meaning + context (i.e., as opposed to black-box parameters).

[ntolley]

@samadpls this could be something to consider for your project!