Renaming in profiling

[plakrisenko]

Some time ago, it was pointed out that certain variable names related to profiles could be improved. Specifically, that profile_list and profile_indices might be confusing. Since consistent naming is important, any changes could impact all code related to profiles. Therefore, I think it's worth discussing this.

Currently, Result object has profile_result attribute of ProfileResult type, which "holds a list of profile lists. Each profile list consists of a list of ProfilerResult objects, one for each parameter". So, each ProfileResult entry is a collection of ProfilerResult objects, all computied using the same optimization result as a starting point, right? However, this is not very obvious. Should we create a ProfileResultCollection (or ProfileResultSet) class to combine ProfilerResult objects and explicitly indicate which optimization results was used to compute them?

Then, profile_list in profile.profile.parameter_profile ( and in profile.util.fill_profile_list, profile_nested_cis, visualize.profile_cis and so on) could become profile_collection_id.

We could keep profile_index or rename it to parameter_index.

Any opinins?

[PaulJonasJost]

Thanks for bringing up this discussion.

I think we currently allow a ProfileResult to exist independently of the OptimizeResult (e.g., if we don't specify in the profiling the already existing result object to be used). Thus, i am not quite sure what you mean with "which optimization results was used". I think what I would half envision is two separate collections within the ProfileResults, one (lets dub it ProfileRuns) that saves specifically some information on the profileing run, such as parameters, initial startpoints etc) and one the ProfilerResults accumulation, all thrown together, but they each have an attribute that tells us which parameter was profiled and to which ProfileRun it points to. We could thus in visualizations or other forms always specify which parameter and which runs and it would enable later to merge specific runs.