add contextual variable

[roussel-ryan]

This pull request introduces support for contextual variables in the VOCS class and updates related logic to handle them appropriately. Contextual variables are those that effect objectives/constraints of interest, but are measured and cannot be controlled directly. As such they are listed as variables. By default they have (-inf, inf) bounds, but these bounds can be overwritten if finite bounds are required (to be implemented by the package).

Support for Contextual Variables:

• Added a new ContextualVariable class as a subclass of ContinuousVariable in gest_api/vocs.py to represent contextual variables.
• Added a has_contextual_variables property to the VOCS class to indicate if any contextual variables are present.

Testing:

• Added a new test test_has_contextual_variables_property in gest_api/tests/test_vocs.py to verify the behavior of the has_contextual_variables property and ensure contextual variables are excluded from bounds.
• Imported ContextualVariable in the test file to support the new tests.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 100.00%. Comparing base (cf08a3e) to head (0b40aaa).
⚠️ Report is 1 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

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  Coverage   100.00%   100.00%           
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  Files            5         5           
  Lines          599       621   +22     
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+ Hits           599       621   +22     

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[jlnav]

I'm happy with the idea, but within most generators then, we need to be careful to select only those variables that aren't ContextualVariables before sampling over the domain, right?

With some [i.bounds for i in self.vocs.variables if not i.isinstance(ContextualVariable)]

Whereas self.vocs.bounds is simpler for logic more likely to be used throughout a generator?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

[roussel-ryan]

That is generally correct, but I would assert that this should be handled on a per package/generator level since each package could treat this differently. Note that in the context of Contextual BO, we need to build the model over the full vocs domain, and then we fix the context value, based on our experience, it makes more sense to keep it in the domain output