Clarification of output array type when metrics accept multiclass/multioutput

Clarification of how we should handle array output type when a metric outputs several values (i.e. accepts multiclass or multioutput input).

The issue was summarised succinctly in https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/pull/30439#issuecomment-2532238196:

> Not sure what should be the output namespace / device in case we output an array, e.g. roc_auc_score with average=None on multiclass problems...

Currently all regression/classification metrics that support array API and multiclass or multioutput, all output an array in the same namespace and device as the input (checked code and manually). Summary of these metrics :

### Regression metrics

Returns array in same namespace/device:
* [explained_variance_score](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.explained_variance_score.html#sklearn.metrics.explained_variance_score)
* [r2_score](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.r2_score.html#sklearn.metrics.r2_score) 
* [mean_absolute_error](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.mean_absolute_error.html#sklearn.metrics.mean_absolute_error)
* [mean_absolute_percentage_error](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.mean_absolute_percentage_error.html#sklearn.metrics.mean_absolute_percentage_error)
* [mean_pinball_loss](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.mean_pinball_loss.html#sklearn.metrics.mean_pinball_loss)
* [mean_squared_error](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.mean_squared_error.html#sklearn.metrics.mean_squared_error)
* [mean_squared_log_error](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.mean_squared_log_error.html#sklearn.metrics.mean_squared_log_error)
* [root_mean_squared_error](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.root_mean_squared_error.html#sklearn.metrics.root_mean_squared_error)
* [root_mean_squared_log_error](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.root_mean_squared_log_error.html#sklearn.metrics.root_mean_squared_log_error)

### Classification metrics
Returns array in same namespace/device:

* [precision_recall_fscore_support](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.precision_recall_fscore_support.html#sklearn.metrics.precision_recall_fscore_support) and family ([f1_score](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.f1_score.html#sklearn.metrics.f1_score), [fbeta_score](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.fbeta_score.html#sklearn.metrics.fbeta_score), [precision_score](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.precision_score.html#sklearn.metrics.precision_score), [recall_score](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.recall_score.html#sklearn.metrics.recall_score))

Looking at the metrics code, if we wanted to support a list of scalars, we'd generally have to do extra processing to convert an array (often output of an xp.** function) to a list of scalars.

Once we arrive at a consensus we should update the array API documentation and update the `check_array_api_metric` in tests such that when the output is array/list - we check that the output type etc is correct.

cc @ogrisel @betatim

COMMENT:
Yes, that sounds right. The 'user' is either:
- an end user -> in all likelihood their workflow is designed to work for _one_ array library[^1] for the bulk of the computation -> they should be familiar with converting things to NumPy if they need matplotlib etc.
- a downstream array-consumer library -> they will already be familiar with converting things to NumPy for internal calculations, or if not, at least for testing.

---

PS: do you know how common (large) multi-output regression models are in practice? My uni course didn't really cover them, so the example I gave feels a bit artificial to me, but I wonder whether it isn't actually so niche. I guess such users would likely be happy to reimplement the metrics themselves if they are already writing a custom function to select feature sets.

[^1]: I think there are words somewhere in the array-api docs about 'mixing and matching' array libraries being out-of-scope (NumPy is obviously a bit of an exception at this stage while various functionality is only available for NumPy)

Labels: Needs Decision, Array API