Towards Recommendation on Good Quality Data Science Solutions

Jian Chen, Yile Chen, Zeyi Wen, Yawen Chen, Jin Huang

Abstract: Data science aims to solve real-world problems with the knowledge derived from data. Successfully tackling a data science problem requires practitioners to choose an appropriate solution, which potentially comprises various components such as pre-processing techniques, learning algorithms, hyper-parameters, and so on. Therefore, a problem-driven recommendation for the promising solution is invaluable, as it facilitates efficient and convenient problem-solving. However, existing solution recommendation approaches confront notable challenges when dealing with limited and sparse prior experience in practical applications. Learning from such prior easily leads to overfitting and poor generalization in solution recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a novel solution recommendation method that can predict a good-quality data science solution, including the pre-processing, the learning algorithm, and hyper-parameters, for a given problem. The foundation of our method is a carefully designed ranking model that exploits a weight-sharing structure and a newly proposed loss. The ranking model focuses on incorporating relative ranking information into the predicted performance score of each solution. With these techniques, our method can recommend the solution with the highest score and effectively mitigate the limitations of using sparse prior experience. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in predicting solutions with higher accuracy and rank, even trained on highly sparse historical performance records. It also reduces recommendation time significantly compared to the baselines, offering remarkable efficiency and convenience for practitioners.