No Arabic abstract
In recent years, an active field of research has developed around automated machine learning (AutoML). Unfortunately, comparing different AutoML systems is hard and often done incorrectly. We introduce an open, ongoing, and extensible benchmark framework which follows best practices and avoids common mistakes. The framework is open-source, uses public datasets and has a website with up-to-date results. We use the framework to conduct a thorough comparison of 4 AutoML systems across 39 datasets and analyze the results.
Tuning machine learning models at scale, especially finding the right hyperparameter values, can be difficult and time-consuming. In addition to the computational effort required, this process also requires some ancillary efforts including engineering tasks (e.g., job scheduling) as well as more mundane tasks (e.g., keeping track of the various parameters and associated results). We present Auptimizer, a general Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) framework to help data scientists speed up model tuning and bookkeeping. With Auptimizer, users can use all available computing resources in distributed settings for model training. The user-friendly system design simplifies creating, controlling, and tracking of a typical machine learning project. The design also allows researchers to integrate new HPO algorithms. To demonstrate its flexibility, we show how Auptimizer integrates a few major HPO techniques (from random search to neural architecture search). The code is available at https://github.com/LGE-ARC-AdvancedAI/auptimizer.
We study the AutoML problem of automatically configuring machine learning pipelines by jointly selecting algorithms and their appropriate hyper-parameters for all steps in supervised learning pipelines. This black-box (gradient-free) optimization with mixed integer & continuous variables is a challenging problem. We propose a novel AutoML scheme by leveraging the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed framework is able to (i) decompose the optimization problem into easier sub-problems that have a reduced number of variables and circumvent the challenge of mixed variable categories, and (ii) incorporate black-box constraints along-side the black-box optimization objective. We empirically evaluate the flexibility (in utilizing existing AutoML techniques), effectiveness (against open source AutoML toolkits),and unique capability (of executing AutoML with practically motivated black-box constraints) of our proposed scheme on a collection of binary classification data sets from UCI ML& OpenML repositories. We observe that on an average our framework provides significant gains in comparison to other AutoML frameworks (Auto-sklearn & TPOT), highlighting the practical advantages of this framework.
Cloud services have recently started undergoing a major shift from monolithic applications, to graphs of hundreds of loosely-coupled microservices. Microservices fundamentally change a lot of assumptions current cloud systems are designed with, and present both opportunities and challenges when optimizing for quality of service (QoS) and utilization. In this paper we explore the implications microservices have across the cloud system stack. We first present DeathStarBench, a novel, open-source benchmark suite built with microservices that is representative of large end-to-end services, modular and extensible. DeathStarBench includes a social network, a media service, an e-commerce site, a banking system, and IoT applications for coordination control of UAV swarms. We then use DeathStarBench to study the architectural characteristics of microservices, their implications in networking and operating systems, their challenges with respect to cluster management, and their trade-offs in terms of application design and programming frameworks. Finally, we explore the tail at scale effects of microservices in real deployments with hundreds of users, and highlight the increased pressure they put on performance predictability.
Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems aim at finding the best machine learning (ML) pipeline that automatically matches the task and data at hand. We investigate the robustness of machine learning pipelines generated with three AutoML systems, TPOT, H2O, and AutoKeras. In particular, we study the influence of dirty data on accuracy, and consider how using dirty training data may help create more robust solutions. Furthermore, we also analyze how the structure of the generated pipelines differs in different cases.
We organized a competition on Autonomous Lifelong Machine Learning with Drift that was part of the competition program of NeurIPS 2018. This data driven competition asked participants to develop computer programs capable of solving supervised learning problems where the i.i.d. assumption did not hold. Large data sets were arranged in a lifelong learning and evaluation scenario and CodaLab was used as the challenge platform. The challenge attracted more than 300 participants in its two month duration. This chapter describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main results.