Notebook Experience in VS

[JakeRadMSFT]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Not related to a "problem" necessarily. When working in VS ... I also want to be able to work with notebooks.

I'm from the ML.NET Model Builder Team and we've had lots of customer feature requests that have been traditionally done by data scientists using notebooks to visualize and iterate on.

Feature Areas:

• Data Prep
• Model Explainability
  • PFI
  • Feature Contribution
  • Decision Tree Visualizations
• Other Visualizations like corelation charts of Actual vs Predicted

We've already seen many customers leveraging notebooks:

• https://github.com/WalternativE/Silencer/blob/main/notebooks/
• https://github.com/search?l=&p=1&q=nuget%3A+Microsoft.ML+extension%3Aipynb&ref=advsearch&type=Code
• ML.NET Community Standup w/ Notebook Usage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeX7BhBPoUE&list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oX-DBuRG4u58ZTAJgBAeQ-t&index=13
• Another Community Standup w/ Notebook Usage- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3xjS5Kj9rU&list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oX-DBuRG4u58ZTAJgBAeQ-t&index=17

We want to offer a seamless experience for starting from ML.NET Model Builder to jumpstarting them into the Notebook world with a generated notebook the same way we generate Console App and Web Api's for users today.

Describe the solution you'd like
Dream:

• Full Notebook experience brought to VS :) and with all the code editing experience I'm used to in VS (intelli-*)
• Able to open any of the notebooks our users can create - See Above for what they've already created.

MVP:

• Can open the file generated by Model Builder w/ ML.NET Code, Tables, and Charts. I will add an example notebook soon.

[jonsequitur]

Related: dotnet/roslyn#51480, #890

[TomWGe]

I have been looking at the distribution of labelled rows vs the distribution of the predictions on unlabelled rows, to see if they have a similar shape. If they do, then I conclude that the training data represents the actual population reasonably well.
I'm testing both AutoML and cross-validation, predicting into CSV files and then making histograms. It would be great to be able to do all of this in a notebook in VS, where the work history can be saved in one place. Currently it's a mix of VS, Excel and OneNote. Here are some examples of the work, documented in OneNote:

After this I also compare PFI after using the two methods (AutoML and cross validation). Totally different, so I must be doing something wrong. :) So, I fully support a simpler way of determining PFI/feature importance, as you mentioned in today's standup. Thanks folks, for the great work and for these new plans.

[saint4eva]

It should have proper intellisense, syntax highlighting and proper visualisation.

[JakeRadMSFT]

Hey All!
You can now try out the Notebook Editor Preview in Visual Studio!

Blog Post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/ml-net-and-model-builder-october-updates/
Install: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MLNET.notebook

[JakeRadMSFT]

@saint4eva
0.2.0 released with richer code editing experience and markdown viewing.

[saint4eva]

@saint4eva 0.2.0 released with richer code editing experience and markdown viewing.

Super! I will try it immediately. Thank you.

[dcuccia]

Would love to have compilation/run/test notebook modules in Visual Studio. I just installed the plugin in VS 17.1 and tried to open a .dib and it hung the UI, so I'm not sure what's supported vs not.