It used to be the case—earlier this spring—that you could have different plots with different groupings, or no grouping, since grouping was specific to a chart and not a view. However, as far as I can tell, this is no longer possible. Is there any ways to get the old functionality?
Hello, This a reply from our support bot designed to assist you with your Weights & Biases related queries. To reach a human please reply to this message.
In the current version of Weights & Biases, the functionality around plot groupings has evolved to provide more flexibility and control over how data is visualized. While the specific changes to plot groupings are not detailed in the provided context, Weights & Biases generally aims to enhance user experience and data analysis capabilities with each update.
To address your need for having different plots with different groupings or no grouping, as was possible earlier, you might consider the following approaches based on the available documentation:
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Customize Line Plots: When creating line plots, you have the option to customize the behavior for the shaded area behind the grouped curve. This includes options like None (no shaded area), Min/Max (shaded region covering the whole range of points in the group), Std Dev (standard deviation of values in the group), and Std Err (standard error as the shaded area). While this customization pertains to the appearance of plots, it indicates the level of control you have over how data is grouped and visualized within individual plots.[1]
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Use of Panels and Weave for Advanced Visualizations: Weave, a feature in W&B, allows for advanced data visualization and analysis. Although the provided context does not detail how Weave directly interacts with plot groupings, it’s designed to offer sophisticated ways to visualize and analyze data. Exploring Weave’s capabilities might provide alternative approaches to achieving the desired functionality of having different plots with different groupings.[2]
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Grouping Runs: While not directly related to plot groupings, organizing your runs into groups can help manage and compare different experiments. This might offer a workaround by allowing you to create separate plots for each group of runs, effectively achieving a similar outcome to having different plots with different groupings.[3]
If these approaches do not directly address your need to restore the old functionality, I recommend reaching out to the Weights & Biases support team or exploring the community forums for more specific guidance or updates related to plot groupings. The W&B team continuously updates the platform, and feedback from users like you is valuable for shaping its development.
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-WandBot 
Good day and thank you for reaching out to us. Happy to help you on this!
Are you referring to the grouping tab when editing a chart/panel from the wandb dashboard (see below)? If not, can you clarify what grouping method are you referring so we can review this from our side?
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Thanks for the reply! I am indeed referring to this “chart grouping” tab. As far as I can tell, the grouping tab for a chart displays only if you have set a grouping in the runs table.
Whatever you set as the chart’s grouping then persists until you change it, including if you disable grouping in the runs table, and it doesn’t have to be the same grouping as what you set for the runs table. Thus, compared to before there’s an extra unnecessary step to get a given grouping for a chart, but the actual functionality remains.
(It’d actually be really cool if groupings for charts could be hierarchical by default, like those with the runs table. Keeping them separate—as is the case currently—is also a good design choice.)
Here, no grouping of runs is selected and no chart grouping tab displays:
Now, after grouping the runs by some config value, I can see the grouping for the chart, and set it to something else (the old functionality):
Thank you @tristanengst we appreciate your feedback here. Let me check this for now and get back to you as soon as I get the chance to discuss this behavior with our team. Would there be any other reason related to your use-case or specific experiments which is why you prefer the previous functionality when using chart grouping?
Hi @tristanengst , since we have not heard back from you we are going to close this request for now. If you would like to re-open the conversation, please let us know!