Real-Time AutoML

Iddo Drori, Brandon Kates, Anant Kharkar, Lu Liu, Qiang Ma, Jonah Deykin, Nihar Sidhu, Madeleine Udell

Keywords: Automated machine learning, zero-shot learning, graph neural networks, transformers

Abstract: We present a new zero-shot approach to automated machine learning (AutoML) that predicts a high-quality model for a supervised learning task and dataset in real-time without fitting a single model. In contrast, most AutoML systems require tens or hundreds of model evaluations. Hence our approach accelerates AutoML by orders of magnitude. Our method uses a transformer-based language embedding to represent datasets and algorithms using their free-text descriptions and a meta-feature extractor to represent the data. We train a graph neural network in which each node represents a dataset to predict the best machine learning pipeline for a new test dataset. The graph neural network generalizes to new datasets and new sets of datasets. Our approach leverages the progress of unsupervised representation learning in natural language processing to provide a significant boost to AutoML. Performance is competitive with state-of-the-art AutoML systems while reducing running time from minutes to seconds and prediction time from minutes to milliseconds, providing AutoML in real-time.

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