Adding Fitting Problem Definition Types

The problem definition types we currently support are listed in the page Problem Definition Files.

To add a new fitting problem type, the parser name must be derived from the file to be parsed. For current file formats by including it as the first line in the file. e.g # Fitbenchmark Problem or NIST/ITL StRD, or by checking the file extension.

To add a new fitting problem definition type, complete the following steps:

  1. Give the format a name (<format_name>). This should be a single word or string of alphanumeric characters, and must be unique ignoring case.

  2. Create a parser in the fitbenchmarking/parsing directory. This parser must satisfy the following:

    • The filename should be of the form "<format_name>_parser.py"
    • The parser must be a subclass of the base parser, Parser
    • The parser must implement parse(self) method which takes only self and returns a populated FittingProblem

    Note: File opening and closing is handled automatically.

  3. If the format is unable to accommodate the current convention of starting with the <format_name>, you will need to edit ParserFactory. This should be done in such a way that the type is inferred from the file.

  4. Create the files to test the new parser. Automated tests are run against the parsers in FitBenchmarking, which work by using test files in fitbenchmarking/parsing/tests/<format_name>. In the test_parsers.generate_test_cases() function, one needs to add the new parser’s name to the variable formats, based on whether or not the parser is pip installable. There are 2 types of test files needed:

    • Generic tests: fitbenchmarking/parsing/tests/expected/ contains two files, basic.json and start_end_x.json. You must write two input files in the new file format, which will be parsed using the new parser to check that the entries in the generated fitting problem match the values expected. These must be called basic.<ext>, start_end_x.<ext>, where <ext> is the extension of the new file format, and they must be placed in fitbenchmarking/parsing/tests/<format_name>/.

    • Function tests: A file named function_evaluations.json must also be provided in fitbenchmarking/parsing/tests/<format_name>/, which tests that the function evaluation behaves as expected. This file must be in json format and contain a string of the form:

      {"file_name1": [[[x11,x12,...,x1n], [param11, param12,...,param1m], [result11,result12,...,result1n]],
                      [[x21,x22,...,x2n], [param21, param22,...,param2m], [result21,result22,...,result2n]],
                      ...],
      {"file_name2": [...],
       ...}
      

      The test will then parse the files file_name<x> in turn evaluate the function at the given xx values and params. If the result is not suitably close to the specified value the test will fail.

    • Integration tests: Add an example to the directory fitbenchmarking/mock_problems/all_parser_set/. This will be used to verify that the problem can be run by scipy, and that accuracy results do not change unexpectedly in future updates. If the software used for the new parser is pip-installable, and the installation is done via FitBenchmarking’s setup.py, then add the same example to fitbenchmarking/mock_problems/default_parsers/.

      As part of this, the systests/expected_results/all_parsers.txt file,

      and if neccessary the systests/expected_results/default_parsers.txt file, will need to be updated. This is done by running the systests:

      pytest fitbenchmarking/systests
      

      and then checking that the only difference between the results table and the expected value is the new problem, and updating the expected file with the result.

  5. Verify that your tests have been found and are successful by running pytest -vv fitbenchmarking/parsing/tests/test_parsers.py