Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) supports practitioners and researchers with the tedious task of designing machine learning pipelines and has recently achieved substantial success. In this paper, we introduce new AutoML approaches motivated by our winning submission to the second ChaLearn AutoML challenge. We develop PoSH Auto-sklearn, which enables AutoML systems to work well on large datasets under rigid time limits by using a new, simple and meta-feature-free meta-learning technique and by employing a successful bandit strategy for budget allocation. However, PoSH Auto-sklearn introduces even more ways of running AutoML and might make it harder for users to set it up correctly. Therefore, we also go one step further and study the design space of AutoML itself, proposing a solution towards truly hands-free AutoML. Together, these changes give rise to the next generation of our AutoML system, Auto-sklearn 2.0. We verify the improvements by these additions in an extensive experimental study on 39 AutoML benchmark datasets. We conclude the paper by comparing to other popular AutoML frameworks and Auto-sklearn 1.0, reducing the relative error by up to a factor of 4.5, and yielding a performance in 10 minutes that is substantially better than what Auto-sklearn 1.0 achieves within an hour.
INAOE（墨西哥国家天体物理、光学与电子研究所）；Paradigm Inc.（第四范式公司）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；UPSud, U. Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学巴黎南大学）；UPSud/INRIA, U. Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学巴黎南大学/法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；ChaLearn（挑战学习组织）；CNRS, U. Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学法国国家科学研究中心）
Research progress in AutoML has lead to state of the art solutions that can cope quite wellwith supervised learning task, e.g., classification with AutoSklearn. However, so far thesesystems do not take into account the changing nature of evolving data over time (i.e., theystill assume i.i.d. data); even when this sort of domains are increasingly available in realapplications (e.g., spam filtering, user preferences, etc.). We describe a first attempt to de-velop an AutoML solution for scenarios in which data distribution changes relatively slowlyover time and in which the problem is approached …
We reduce the computational cost of Neural AutoML with transfer learning. AutoML relieves human effort by automating the design of ML algorithms. Neural AutoML has become popular for the design of deep learning architectures, however, this method has a high computation cost. To address this we propose Transfer Neural AutoML that uses knowledge from prior tasks to speed up network design. We extend RL-based architecture search methods to support parallel training on multiple tasks and then transfer the search strategy to new tasks. On language and image classification tasks, Transfer Neural Aut…
Aimsun SLU（Aimsun SLU公司）；DeustoTech（德乌斯托技术中心）；Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto（德乌斯托大学工程学院）；University of Deusto（德乌斯托大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（巴斯克科学基金会IKERBASQUE）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）
Intelligent Transportation Systems are producing tons of hardly manageable traffic data, which motivates the use of Machine Learning (ML) for data-driven applications, such as Traffic Forecasting (TF). TF is gaining relevance due to its ability to mitigate traffic congestion by forecasting future traffic states. However, TF poses one big challenge to the ML paradigm, known as the Model Selection Problem (MSP): deciding the most suitable combination of data preprocessing techniques and ML method for traffic data collected under different transportation circumstances. In this context, Automated …
AutoML serves as the bridge between varying levels of expertise when designing machine learning systems and expedites the data science process. A wide range of techniques is taken to address this, however there does not exist an objective comparison of these techniques. We present a benchmark of current open source AutoML solutions using open source datasets. We test auto-sklearn, TPOT, auto_ml, and H2O's AutoML solution against a compiled set of regression and classification datasets sourced from OpenML and find that auto-sklearn performs the best across classification datasets and TPOT perfo…
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center（西达赛奈医学中心）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；AGH University of Science and Technology（AGH科技大学）
Automated machine learning (AutoML) algorithms have grown in popularity due to their high performance and flexibility to adapt to different problems and data sets. With the increasing number of AutoML algorithms, deciding which would best suit a given problem becomes increasingly more work. Therefore, it is essential to use complex and challenging benchmarks which would be able to differentiate the AutoML algorithms from each other. This paper compares the performance of four different AutoML algorithms: Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT), Auto-Sklearn, Auto-Sklearn 2, and H2O AutoML…
Building a machine learning (ML) pipeline in an automated way is a crucial and complex task as it is constrained with the available time budget and resources. This encouraged the research community to introduce several solutions to utilize the available time and resources. A lot of work is done to suggest the most promising classifiers for a given dataset using sundry of techniques including meta-learning based techniques. This gives the autoML framework the chance to spend more time exploiting those classifiers and tuning their hyper-parameters. In this paper, we empirically study the hypothe…
The AutoML task consists of selecting the proper algorithm in a machine learning portfolio, and its hyperparameter values, in order to deliver the best performance on the dataset at hand. Mosaic, a Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) based approach, is presented to handle the AutoML hybrid structural and parametric expensive black-box optimization problem. Extensive empirical studies are conducted to independently assess and compare: i) the optimization processes based on Bayesian optimization or MCTS; ii) its warm-start initialization; iii) the ensembling of the solutions gathered along the search…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）
Lifelong learning, the problem of continual learning where tasks arrive in sequence, has been lately attracting more attention in the computer vision community. The aim of lifelong learning is to develop a system that can learn new tasks while maintaining the performance on the previously learned tasks. However, there are two obstacles for lifelong learning of deep neural networks: catastrophic forgetting and capacity limitation. To solve the above issues, inspired by the recent breakthroughs in automatically learning good neural network architectures, we develop a Multi-task based lifelong le…
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；University of Hildesheim（希尔德斯海姆大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Given a new dataset D and a low compute budget, how should we choose a pre-trained model to fine-tune to D, and set the fine-tuning hyperparameters without risking overfitting, particularly if D is small? Here, we extend automated machine learning (AutoML) to best make these choices. Our domain-independent meta-learning approach learns a zero-shot surrogate model which, at test time, allows to select the right deep learning (DL) pipeline (including the pre-trained model and fine-tuning hyperparameters) for a new dataset D given only trivial meta-features describing D such as image resolution o…
Automated machine learning (AutoML) has received increasing attention in the recent past. While the main tools for AutoML, such as Auto-WEKA, TPOT, and auto-sklearn, mainly deal with single-label classification and regression, there is very little work on other types of machine learning tasks. In particular, there is almost no work on automating the engineering of machine learning applications for multi-label classification. This paper makes two contributions. First, it discusses the usefulness and feasibility of an AutoML approach for multi-label classification. Second, we show how the scope …
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Fraunhofer IAO（弗劳恩霍夫工业工程研究所）
In the last few years, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has gained much attention. With that said, the question arises whether AutoML can outperform results achieved by human data scientists. This paper compares four AutoML frameworks on 12 different popular datasets from OpenML; six of them supervised classification tasks and the other six supervised regression ones. Additionally, we consider a real-life dataset from one of our recent projects. The results show that the automated frameworks perform better or equal than the machine learning community in 7 out of 12 OpenML tasks.
Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems aim at finding the best machine learning (ML) pipeline that automatically matches the task and data at hand. We investigate the robustness of machine learning pipelines generated with three AutoML systems, TPOT, H2O, and AutoKeras. In particular, we study the influence of dirty data on accuracy, and consider how using dirty training data may help create more robust solutions. Furthermore, we also analyze how the structure of the generated pipelines differs in different cases.
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；H2O.ai（H2O.ai公司）；Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich（慕尼黑路德维希-马克西米利安大学）
In recent years, an active field of research has developed around automated machine learning (AutoML). Unfortunately, comparing different AutoML systems is hard and often done incorrectly. We introduce an open, ongoing, and extensible benchmark framework which follows best practices and avoids common mistakes. The framework is open-source, uses public datasets and has a website with up-to-date results. We use the framework to conduct a thorough comparison of 4 AutoML systems across 39 datasets and analyze the results.
Capital One（第一资本金融公司）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
There has been considerable growth and interest in industrial applications of machine learning (ML) in recent years. ML engineers, as a consequence, are in high demand across the industry, yet improving the efficiency of ML engineers remains a fundamental challenge. Automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a way to save time and effort on repetitive tasks in ML pipelines, such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and prediction result analysis. In this paper, we investigate the current state of AutoML tools aiming to automate thes…
The General Automated Machine learning Assistant (GAMA) is a modular AutoML system developed to empower users to track and control how AutoML algorithms search for optimal machine learning pipelines, and facilitate AutoML research itself. In contrast to current, often black-box systems, GAMA allows users to plug in different AutoML and post-processing techniques, logs and visualizes the search process, and supports easy benchmarking. It currently features three AutoML search algorithms, two model post-processing steps, and is designed to allow for more components to be added.
Computer Science Department Instituto Nacional de Astrof\'isica, \'Optica y Electr\'onica, Tonanzintla, Puebla, 72840, Mexico
Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the sub-field of machine learning that aims at automating, to some extend, all stages of the design of a machine learning system. In the context of supervised learning, AutoML is concerned with feature extraction, pre processing, model design and post processing. Major contributions and achievements in AutoML have been taking place during the recent decade. We are therefore in perfect timing to look back and realize what we have learned. This chapter aims to summarize the main findings in the early years of AutoML. More specifically, in this chapter an in…
As a result of the ever increasing complexity of configuring and fine-tuning machine learning models, the field of automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged over the past decade. However, software implementations like Auto-WEKA and Auto-sklearn typically focus on classical machine learning (ML) tasks such as classification and regression. Our work can be seen as the first attempt at offering a single AutoML framework for most problem settings that fall under the umbrella of multi-target prediction, which includes popular ML settings such as multi-label classification, multivariate regres…
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems have been shown to efficiently build good models for new datasets. However, it is often not clear how well they can adapt when the data evolves over time. The main goal of this study is to understand the effect of data stream challenges such as concept drift on the performance of AutoML methods, and which adaptation strategies can be employed to make them more robust. To that end, we propose 6 concept drift adaptation strategies and evaluate their effectiveness on different AutoML approaches. We do this for a variety of AutoML approaches for building…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
As a human choosing a supervised learning algorithm, it is natural to begin by reading a text description of the dataset and documentation for the algorithms you might use. We demonstrate that the same idea improves the performance of automated machine learning methods. We use language embeddings from modern NLP to improve state-of-the-art AutoML systems by augmenting their recommendations with vector embeddings of datasets and of algorithms. We use these embeddings in a neural architecture to learn the distance between best-performing pipelines. The resulting (meta-)AutoML framework improves …
University of Torontoland（多伦多兰大学）；University of Edenborrow（伊登伯勒大学）
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is the problem of automatically finding the pipeline with the best generalization performance on some given dataset. AutoML has received enormous attention in the last decade and has been addressed with sophisticated black-box optimization techniques such as Bayesian Optimization, Grammar-Based Genetic Algorithms, and tree search algorithms. In contrast to those approaches, we present Naive AutoML, a very simple solution to AutoML that exploits important meta-knowledge about machine learning problems and makes simplifying, yet, effective assumptions to quick…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Fraunhofer IAO（弗劳恩霍夫工业工程研究所）
Recently, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has registered increasing success with respect to tabular data. However, the question arises whether AutoML can also be applied effectively to text classification tasks. This work compares four AutoML tools on 13 different popular datasets, including Kaggle competitions, and opposes human performance. The results show that the AutoML tools perform better than the machine learning community in 4 out of 13 tasks and that two stand out.
We explore trust in a relatively new area of data science: Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). In AutoML, AI methods are used to generate and optimize machine learning models by automatically engineering features, selecting models, and optimizing hyperparameters. In this paper, we seek to understand what kinds of information influence data scientists' trust in the models produced by AutoML? We operationalize trust as a willingness to deploy a model produced using automated methods. We report results from three studies -- qualitative interviews, a controlled experiment, and a card-sorting task…
Position: A Call to Action for a Human-Centered AutoML Paradigm
L3S Research Center（L3S研究中心）；Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München（慕尼黑大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Fraunhofer IIS（弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Microsoft（微软公司）；Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg（阿尔伯特-路德维希-弗莱堡大学）
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems aim to enable training machine learning (ML) models for non-ML experts. A shortcoming of these systems is that when they fail to produce a model with high accuracy, the user has no path to improve the model other than hiring a data scientist or learning ML -- this defeats the purpose of AutoML and limits its adoption. We introduce an interpretable data feedback solution for AutoML. Our solution suggests new data points for the user to label (without requiring a pool of unlabeled data) to improve the model's accuracy. Our solution analyzes how feature…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）
AutoML systems build machine learning models automatically by performing a search over valid data transformations and learners, along with hyper-parameter optimization for each learner. Many AutoML systems use meta-learning to guide search for optimal pipelines. In this work, we present a novel meta-learning system called KGpip which, (1) builds a database of datasets and corresponding pipelines by mining thousands of scripts with program analysis, (2) uses dataset embeddings to find similar datasets in the database based on its content instead of metadata-based features, (3) models AutoML pip…
USU Software AG（USU软件股份公司）；Institute of Industrial Manufacturing and Management IFF（工业制造与管理研究所（IFF））；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所（IPA））
Machine learning (ML) has become a vital part in many aspects of our daily life. However, building well performing machine learning applications requires highly specialized data scientists and domain experts. Automated machine learning (AutoML) aims to reduce the demand for data scientists by enabling domain experts to build machine learning applications automatically without extensive knowledge of statistics and machine learning. This paper is a combination of a survey on current AutoML methods and a benchmark of popular AutoML frameworks on real data sets. Driven by the selected frameworks f…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR)（人工智能研究中心（CAIR））；University of Agder（阿格德大学）
Short Message Service (SMS) is a very popular service used for communication by mobile users. However, this popular service can be abused by executing illegal activities and influencing security risks. Nowadays, many automatic machine learning (AutoML) tools exist which can help domain experts and lay users to build high-quality ML models with little or no machine learning knowledge. In this work, a classification performance comparison was conducted between three automatic ML tools for SMS spam message filtering. These tools are mljar-supervised AutoML, H2O AutoML, and Tree-based Pipeline Opt…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
There are currently many barriers that prevent non-experts from exploiting machine learning solutions ranging from the lack of intuition on statistical learning techniques to the trickiness of hyperparameter tuning. Such barriers have led to an explosion of interest in automated machine learning (AutoML), whereby an off-the-shelf system can take care of many of the steps for end-users without the need for expertise in machine learning. This paper presents Ensemble Squared (Ensemble$^2$), an AutoML system that ensembles the results of state-of-the-art open-source AutoML systems. Ensemble$^2$ ex…
Automated machine learning (AutoML) aims to find optimal machine learning solutions automatically given a machine learning problem. It could release the burden of data scientists from the multifarious manual tuning process and enable the access of domain experts to the off-the-shelf machine learning solutions without extensive experience. In this paper, we review the current developments of AutoML in terms of three categories, automated feature engineering (AutoFE), automated model and hyperparameter learning (AutoMHL), and automated deep learning (AutoDL). State-of-the-art techniques adopted …
Letovo School（莱托沃学校）；University of Tennessee（田纳西大学）
This paper discusses modern Auto Machine Learning (AutoML) tools from the perspective of a person with little prior experience in Machine Learning (ML). There are many AutoML tools both ready-to-use and under development, which are created to simplify and democratize usage of ML technologies in everyday life. Our position is that ML should be easy to use and available to a greater number of people. Prior research has identified the need for intuitive AutoML tools. This work seeks to understand how well AutoML tools have achieved that goal in practice. We evaluate three AutoML Tools to evaluate…
Data scientists seeking a good supervised learning model on a new dataset have many choices to make: they must preprocess the data, select features, possibly reduce the dimension, select an estimation algorithm, and choose hyperparameters for each of these pipeline components. With new pipeline components comes a combinatorial explosion in the number of choices! In this work, we design a new AutoML system to address this challenge: an automated system to design a supervised learning pipeline. Our system uses matrix and tensor factorization as surrogate models to model the combinatorial pipelin…
Mastering AI: Big Data, Deep Learning, and the Evolution of Large Language Models -- AutoML from Basics to State-of-the-Art Techniques
National Taiwan Normal University（台湾师范大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；University of Hawaii（夏威夷大学）；AppCubic；Kyoto University（京都大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）
This work improves the quality of automated machine learning (AutoML) systems by using dataset and function descriptions while significantly decreasing computation time from minutes to milliseconds by using a zero-shot approach. Given a new dataset and a well-defined machine learning task, humans begin by reading a description of the dataset and documentation for the algorithms to be used. This work is the first to use these textual descriptions, which we call privileged information, for AutoML. We use a pre-trained Transformer model to process the privileged text and demonstrate that using th…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Automatic machine learning (AutoML) is a key enabler of the mass deployment of the next generation of machine learning systems. A key desideratum for future ML systems is the automatic selection of models and hyperparameters. We present a novel method of selecting performant configurations for a given task by performing offline autoML and mining over a diverse set of tasks. By mining the training tasks, we can select a compact portfolio of configurations that perform well over a wide variety of tasks, as well as learn a strategy to select portfolio configurations for yet-unseen tasks. The algo…
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University（斯坦福大学计算机科学系）
AutoML has demonstrated remarkable success in finding an effective neural architecture for a given machine learning task defined by a specific dataset and an evaluation metric. However, most present AutoML techniques consider each task independently from scratch, which requires exploring many architectures, leading to high computational cost. Here we propose AutoTransfer, an AutoML solution that improves search efficiency by transferring the prior architectural design knowledge to the novel task of interest. Our key innovation includes a task-model bank that captures the model performance over…
Machine learning research has advanced in multiple aspects, including model structures and learning methods. The effort to automate such research, known as AutoML, has also made significant progress. However, this progress has largely focused on the architecture of neural networks, where it has relied on sophisticated expert-designed layers as building blocks---or similarly restrictive search spaces. Our goal is to show that AutoML can go further: it is possible today to automatically discover complete machine learning algorithms just using basic mathematical operations as building blocks. We …
Algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning remain two of the most challenging tasks in machine learning. Automated machine learning (AutoML) seeks to automate these tasks to enable widespread use of machine learning by non-experts. This paper introduces OBOE, a collaborative filtering method for time-constrained model selection and hyperparameter tuning. OBOE forms a matrix of the cross-validated errors of a large number of supervised learning models (algorithms together with hyperparameters) on a large number of datasets, and fits a low rank model to learn the low-dimensional feature vecto…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre（网络安全合作研究中心）
Machine learning (ML) has developed rapidly in the past few years and has successfully been utilized for a broad range of tasks, including phishing detection. However, building an effective ML-based detection system is not a trivial task, and requires data scientists with knowledge of the relevant domain. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) frameworks have received a lot of attention in recent years, enabling non-ML experts in building a machine learning model. This brings to an intriguing question of whether AutoML can outperform the results achieved by human data scientists. Our paper compar…
The popularity of automated machine learning (AutoML) tools in different domains has increased over the past few years. Machine learning (ML) practitioners use AutoML tools to automate and optimize the process of feature engineering, model training, and hyperparameter optimization and so on. Recent work performed qualitative studies on practitioners' experiences of using AutoML tools and compared different AutoML tools based on their performance and provided features, but none of the existing work studied the practices of using AutoML tools in real-world projects at a large scale. Therefore, w…
OptumLabs at UnitedHealth Group（联合健康集团 OptumLabs）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
We ascertain and compare the performances of AutoML tools on large, highly imbalanced healthcare datasets. We generated a large dataset using historical administrative claims including demographic information and flags for disease codes in four different time windows prior to 2019. We then trained three AutoML tools on this dataset to predict six different disease outcomes in 2019 and evaluated model performances on several metrics. The AutoML tools showed improvement from the baseline random forest model but did not differ significantly from each other. All models recorded low area under the …
College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学交通运输工程学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局信息通信研究所）
With the enrichment of smartphones, driving distractions caused by phone usages have become a threat to driving safety. A promising way to mitigate driving distractions is to detect them and give real-time safety warnings. However, existing detection algorithms face two major challenges, low user acceptance caused by in-vehicle camera sensors, and uncertain accuracy of pre-trained models due to drivers individual differences. Therefore, this study proposes a domain-specific automated machine learning (AutoML) to self-learn the optimal models to detect distraction based on lane-keeping performa…
