AL: Autogenerating supervised learning programs

Abstract

We present AL, a novel automated machine learning system that learns to generate new supervised learning pipelines from an existing corpus of supervised learning programs. In contrast to existing automated machine learning tools, which typically implement a search over manually selected machine learning functions and classes, AL learns to identify the relevant classes in an API by analyzing dynamic program traces that use the target machine learning library. AL constructs a conditional probability model from these traces to estimate the likelihood of the generated supervised learning pipelines and uses this model to guide the search to generate pipelines for new datasets. Our evaluation shows that AL can produce successful pipelines for datasets that previous systems fail to process and produces pipelines with comparable predictive performance for datasets that previous systems process successfully.