The Automatic Statistician

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Christian Steinruecken, Emma Smith, David Janz, James Robert Lloyd, Zoubin Ghahramani

Published: 2019, Last Modified: 06 Oct 2025Automated Machine Learning 2019EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: The Automatic Statistician project aims to automate data science, producing predictions and human-readable reports from raw datasets with minimal human intervention. Alongside basic graphs and statistics, the generated reports contain a curation of high-level insights about the dataset that are obtained from (1) an automated construction of models for the dataset, (2) a comparison of these models, and (3) a software component that turns these results into natural language descriptions. This chapter describes the common architecture of such Automatic Statistician systems, and discusses some of the design decisions and technical challenges.