[FR] More flexible X-axis for time series plots

[vilim]

Willingness to contribute

Yes. I would be willing to contribute this feature with guidance from the MLflow community.

Proposal Summary

It would be very useful to have the per-epoch metrics also plotted vs epoch on the x-axis, not step. In general, it should be possible to have an arbitrary calculated expression from metrics for both x and y axes in plots.

Motivation

What is the use case for this feature?

Comparing models, tracking training.

Why is it currently difficult to achieve this use case?

It is only possible to select time or step as the x axis.

Details

No response

What component(s) does this bug affect?

• [ ] area/artifacts: Artifact stores and artifact logging
• [ ] area/build: Build and test infrastructure for MLflow
• [ ] area/deployments: MLflow Deployments client APIs, server, and third-party Deployments integrations
• [ ] area/docs: MLflow documentation pages
• [ ] area/examples: Example code
• [ ] area/model-registry: Model Registry service, APIs, and the fluent client calls for Model Registry
• [ ] area/models: MLmodel format, model serialization/deserialization, flavors
• [ ] area/recipes: Recipes, Recipe APIs, Recipe configs, Recipe Templates
• [ ] area/projects: MLproject format, project running backends
• [ ] area/scoring: MLflow Model server, model deployment tools, Spark UDFs
• [ ] area/server-infra: MLflow Tracking server backend
• [ ] area/tracking: Tracking Service, tracking client APIs, autologging

What interface(s) does this bug affect?

• [X] area/uiux: Front-end, user experience, plotting, JavaScript, JavaScript dev server
• [ ] area/docker: Docker use across MLflow's components, such as MLflow Projects and MLflow Models
• [ ] area/sqlalchemy: Use of SQLAlchemy in the Tracking Service or Model Registry
• [ ] area/windows: Windows support

What language(s) does this bug affect?

• [ ] language/r: R APIs and clients
• [ ] language/java: Java APIs and clients
• [ ] language/new: Proposals for new client languages

What integration(s) does this bug affect?

• [ ] integrations/azure: Azure and Azure ML integrations
• [ ] integrations/sagemaker: SageMaker integrations
• [ ] integrations/databricks: Databricks integrations

[serena-ruan]

Do we have any plans on supporting this feature? @daniellok-db @hubertzub-db

[hubertzub-db]

@vilim thanks for filing in the issue!

to have an arbitrary calculated expression from metrics for both x and y axes in plots.

before we jump into that - can you provide a concrete example of how the resulting chart axis/values would be in that scenario so we can be sure we're all on the same page? 🙂

[vilim]

An example would be e.g. weighted sum of accuracies over different classes

[hubertzub-db]

@vilim ah got it! So there's an experimental feature of using metric values for X-axis already! It's disabled by default in MLflow UI code, but can be enabled by flipping this flag to true: https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow/blob/06ecbe720332b24b19c1c4b39f5068f782411823/mlflow/server/js/src/common/utils/FeatureUtils.ts#L34-L34

Please let know if this helps. Also CC @daniellok-db shall we enable it globally already?

[daniellok-db]

i think it's probably safe to enable, we can do it next time we update the UI!

[vilim]

Great, thanks!

[github-actions[bot]]

@mlflow/mlflow-team Please assign a maintainer and start triaging this issue.

[hubertzub-db]

Let's close it as soon as we enable phase3 features then