User-Defined Sampler

Thanks to user-defined samplers, you can:

• experiment your own sampling algorithms,
• implement task-specific algorithms to refine the optimization performance, or
• wrap other optimization libraries to integrate them into Optuna pipelines (e.g., SkoptSampler).

This section describes the internal behavior of sampler classes and shows an example of implementing a user-defined sampler.

Overview of Sampler

A sampler has the responsibility to determine the parameter values to be evaluated in a trial. When a suggest API (e.g., suggest_uniform()) is called inside an objective function, the corresponding distribution object (e.g., UniformDistribution) is created internally. A sampler samples a parameter value from the distribution. The sampled value is returned to the caller of the suggest API and evaluated in the objective function.

To create a new sampler, you need to define a class that inherits BaseSampler. The base class has three abstract methods; infer_relative_search_space(), sample_relative(), and sample_independent().

As the method names imply, Optuna supports two types of sampling: one is relative sampling that can consider the correlation of the parameters in a trial, and the other is independent sampling that samples each parameter independently.

At the beginning of a trial, infer_relative_search_space() is called to provide the relative search space for the trial. Then, sample_relative() is invoked to sample relative parameters from the search space. During the execution of the objective function, sample_independent() is used to sample parameters that don’t belong to the relative search space.

Note

Please refer to the document of BaseSampler for further details.

An Example: Implementing SimulatedAnnealingSampler

For example, the following code defines a sampler based on Simulated Annealing (SA):

import numpy as np
import optuna


class SimulatedAnnealingSampler(optuna.samplers.BaseSampler):
    def __init__(self, temperature=100):
        self._rng = np.random.RandomState()
        self._temperature = temperature  # Current temperature.
        self._current_trial = None  # Current state.

    def sample_relative(self, study, trial, search_space):
        if search_space == {}:
            return {}

        #
        # An implementation of SA algorithm.
        #

        # Calculate transition probability.
        prev_trial = study.trials[-2]
        if self._current_trial is None or prev_trial.value <= self._current_trial.value:
            probability = 1.0
        else:
            probability = np.exp((self._current_trial.value - prev_trial.value) / self._temperature)
        self._temperature *= 0.9  # Decrease temperature.

        # Transit the current state if the previous result is accepted.
        if self._rng.uniform(0, 1) < probability:
            self._current_trial = prev_trial

        # Sample parameters from the neighborhood of the current point.
        #
        # The sampled parameters will be used during the next execution of
        # the objective function passed to the study.
        params = {}
        for param_name, param_distribution in search_space.items():
            if not isinstance(param_distribution, optuna.distributions.UniformDistribution):
                raise NotImplementedError('Only suggest_uniform() is supported')

            current_value = self._current_trial.params[param_name]
            width = (param_distribution.high - param_distribution.low) * 0.1
            neighbor_low = max(current_value - width, param_distribution.low)
            neighbor_high = min(current_value + width, param_distribution.high)
            params[param_name] = self._rng.uniform(neighbor_low, neighbor_high)

        return params

    #
    # The rest is boilerplate code and unrelated to SA algorithm.
    #
    def infer_relative_search_space(self, study, trial):
        return optuna.samplers.intersection_search_space(study)

    def sample_independent(self, study, trial, param_name, param_distribution):
        independent_sampler = optuna.samplers.RandomSampler()
        return independent_sampler.sample_independent(study, trial, param_name, param_distribution)

Note

In favor of code simplicity, the above implementation doesn’t support some features (e.g., maximization). If you’re interested in how to support those features, please see examples/samplers/simulated_annealing.py.

You can use SimulatedAnnealingSampler in the same way as built-in samplers as follows:

def objective(trial):
    x = trial.suggest_uniform('x', -10, 10)
    y = trial.suggest_uniform('y', -5, 5)
    return x**2 + y

sampler = SimulatedAnnealingSampler()
study = optuna.create_study(sampler=sampler)
study.optimize(objective, n_trials=100)

In this optimization, the values of x and y parameters are sampled by using SimulatedAnnealingSampler.sample_relative method.

Note

Strictly speaking, in the first trial, SimulatedAnnealingSampler.sample_independent method is used to sample parameter values. Because intersection_search_space() used in SimulatedAnnealingSampler.infer_relative_search_space cannot infer the search space if there are no complete trials.