@amueller I added the random_state in all cases I could find that made sense to me. I am not sure where to add the suggestion for new tests to pass the random_state in the docs.

@Nuffe 's excellent scipt still suggests some cases but most of them are false positive - I think!

Seems good to me... But I'm sure merging this is going to raise merge conflicts at several PRs ;)

@jnothman / @amueller do you want to have a second look?

this has lots of conflicts :-/

I remember at some point a couple of senior devs (I can't find now exactly where, at an email probably) agreeing that random state should not be passed at tests. That's why I left it as it is. In hindsight, my personal --inexperienced-- opinion is that it is not always the best idea. Perhaps each test has different value if it is deterministic or not. If you want I could try to quickly resolve those conflicts but I cannot look into each test and understand if it's the best thing to do.

Sorry I don't understand you comment. I thought we agreed we wanted to add the random state. What does that have to do with the conflicts?

If we want to add the random state at almost all tests, then I will resolve the conflicts. If it is going to be integrated in the master then great. I think there was a discussion here #8194

ping @lesteve @agramfort @ogrisel @GaelVaroquaux So what's the consensus? I think we should set them.

Seems like a lot of conflicts..

Would monkeypatching random_state in all estimators in a pytest fixture (see e.g. https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/monkeypatch.html#example-preventing-requests-from-remote-operations) be too horrible? For instance, with a few lines, one could make it a property there that returns e.g. 42 if it's set with None in __init__, but I guess it will break some of API tests (or at least make results dubious).. ping @lesteve

Just for the record, I am not really convinced that this is worth the pain as I tried to explain in #8194 (comment).

This is quite outdated based on our recent changes, and we mostly set random state when needed in common tests and otherwise these days. So I think we can close this one.