2. Pythonic Search Space

For hyperparameter sampling, Optuna provides the following features:

• optuna.trial.Trial.suggest_categorical() for categorical parameters

• optuna.trial.Trial.suggest_int() for integer parameters

• optuna.trial.Trial.suggest_float() for floating point parameters

With optional arguments of step and log, we can discretize or take the logarithm of integer and floating point parameters.

import optuna


def objective(trial):
    # Categorical parameter
    optimizer = trial.suggest_categorical("optimizer", ["MomentumSGD", "Adam"])

    # Integer parameter
    num_layers = trial.suggest_int("num_layers", 1, 3)

    # Integer parameter (log)
    num_channels = trial.suggest_int("num_channels", 32, 512, log=True)

    # Integer parameter (discretized)
    num_units = trial.suggest_int("num_units", 10, 100, step=5)

    # Floating point parameter
    dropout_rate = trial.suggest_float("dropout_rate", 0.0, 1.0)

    # Floating point parameter (log)
    learning_rate = trial.suggest_float("learning_rate", 1e-5, 1e-2, log=True)

    # Floating point parameter (discretized)
    drop_path_rate = trial.suggest_float("drop_path_rate", 0.0, 1.0, step=0.1)

Defining Parameter Spaces

In Optuna, we define search spaces using familiar Python syntax including conditionals and loops.

Also, you can use branches or loops depending on the parameter values.

For more various use, see examples.

• Branches:

import sklearn.ensemble
import sklearn.svm


def objective(trial):
    classifier_name = trial.suggest_categorical("classifier", ["SVC", "RandomForest"])
    if classifier_name == "SVC":
        svc_c = trial.suggest_float("svc_c", 1e-10, 1e10, log=True)
        classifier_obj = sklearn.svm.SVC(C=svc_c)
    else:
        rf_max_depth = trial.suggest_int("rf_max_depth", 2, 32, log=True)
        classifier_obj = sklearn.ensemble.RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=rf_max_depth)

• Loops:

import torch
import torch.nn as nn


def create_model(trial, in_size):
    n_layers = trial.suggest_int("n_layers", 1, 3)

    layers = []
    for i in range(n_layers):
        n_units = trial.suggest_int("n_units_l{}".format(i), 4, 128, log=True)
        layers.append(nn.Linear(in_size, n_units))
        layers.append(nn.ReLU())
        in_size = n_units
    layers.append(nn.Linear(in_size, 10))

    return nn.Sequential(*layers)

Note on the Number of Parameters

The difficulty of optimization increases roughly exponentially with regard to the number of parameters. That is, the number of necessary trials increases exponentially when you increase the number of parameters, so it is recommended to not add unimportant parameters.