maketablessupport via plug-in solution

[s3alfisc]

Description

This PR prototypes how to add support for maketables regression tables without making maketables a doubleML dependency.

It

• implements a MakeTablesMixin class, that implements the plug-in protocol we have recently added to maketables
• The DoubleML base class now inherits from MakeTablesMixin: class DoubleML(MakeTablesMixin, SampleSplittingMixin, ABC):
• This allows DoubleML users to use all the functionality of maketables without making maketables a DoubleML dependency.
• There is also a jupyter notebook that allows you to explore the functionality.
• I also updated the gitignore to ignore venv files - more than happy to revert this.

What still would need to be added / where I would need feedback from you:

• Are there any other attributes that should be stored?
• Should I write tests (I suppose yes) - where should I put these?
• Should I open a PR to the documentation to showcase to users how to produce regression tables with maketables?

Reference to Issues or PRs

Here is the related discussion thread: #375

Comments

This is a proof of concept and heavily coded with AI - I am experimenting with a skills.md that might hopefully help me / enable maintainers to easily add support for maketables.

PR Checklist

• The title of the pull request summarizes the changes made.
• The PR contains a detailed description of all changes and additions.
• References to related issues or PRs are added.
• The code passes all (unit) tests.
• Enhancements or new feature are equipped with unit tests.
• The changes adhere to the PEP8 standards.

FYI @dsliwka

[SvenKlaassen]

Thank you very much.
I am sorry it took so long, but we are currently in quite busy and I will try to find some time to give you more regular feedback.
I think this already looks quite good, but I will have to check in detail.
I would keep the current implementation and might update or move it in the future to the framework class to cover a larger call of models.

Regarding tests:

• I have updated the docstrings to fix the tests. I think not all properties need examples as they are really self explanatory.
• I would suggest to include a simple test file in https://github.com/DoubleML/doubleml-for-py/tree/main/doubleml/utils/tests, which tests the basic integration with maketables, e.g. what happens if one is calling ETable before fit etc.

It would be great, if you move the example notebook to a PR on the dev branch of the documentation repository (example notebooks are located at https://github.com/DoubleML/doubleml-docs/tree/dev/doc/examples)