Potential New Feature: allowing users to input customized initial pipelines about tpot

[perib]

Thank you for your interest in contributing! We would love to have your help.

We have shifted development into our next version, TPOT2. We rewrote the codebase from scratch with the goal of making it clearer, more modular, and easier to extend and maintain. This also resolves many bugs/issues with TPOT1 (such as infinitely stalling), and begins to implement some new features (such as graph-based pipelines).

We have an alpha version of the codebase here: https://github.com/EpistasisLab/tpot2/tree/main . The dev branch contains the latest version, while the main is the current "stable version."
It is still in development, and things may change over time. We would love feedback on the organization/API/etc , especially from people looking to contribute.

For your question, about the initial population:
In TPOT2, the initial population is pulled from a generator that yields individuals. The code that is currently used is found here. Effectively, it loops through the possible root nodes and adds a number of random insertions to create the random population. This would be the function to modify to change how the initial population is generated.

The actual individual class is defined here: Its essentially a networkX graph of NodeLabel() objects that hold the method class (as types) and the hyperparameters (as dictionaries). the root node is the parent, child nodes feed their output to the parent nodes.

So if we want the user to provide the initial pipelines, we would just need a function that converts sklearn pipelines to the graphindividual format.

Feel free to open an issue on the TPOT2 page.

I'm also happy to set up a meeting to discuss any questions/concerns