Automatic frankensteining: Creating complex ensembles autonomously

Abstract

Automating machine learning by providing techniques that autonomously find the best algorithm, hyperparameter configuration and preprocessing is helpful for both researchers and practitioners. Therefore, it is not surprising that automated machine learning has become a very interesting field of research. While current research is mainly focusing on finding good pairs of algorithms and hyperparameter configurations, we will present an approach that automates the process of creating a top performing ensemble of several layers, different algorithms and hyperparameter configurations. These kinds of ensembles are called jokingly Frankenstein ensembles and proved their benefit on versatile data sets in many machine learning challenges. We compare our approach Automatic Frankensteining with the current state of the art for automated machine learning on 80 different data sets and can show that it outperforms them on the majority using the same training time. Furthermore, we compare Automatic Frankensteining on a large scale data set to more than 3,500 machine learning expert teams and are able to outperform more than 3,000 of them within 12 CPU hours.