{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/exploring-opportunistic-meta-knowledge-to","title":"Exploring Opportunistic Meta-knowledge to Reduce Search Spaces for Automated Machine Learning","arxiv_id":"2105.00282","date":"2021-05-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tien-Dung Nguyen","David Jacob Kedziora","Katarzyna Musial","Bogdan Gabrys"],"abstract":"Machine learning (ML) pipeline composition and optimisation have been studied to seek multi-stage ML models, i.e. preprocessor-inclusive, that are both valid and well-performing. These processes typically require the design and traversal of complex configuration spaces consisting of not just individual ML components and their hyperparameters, but also higher-level pipeline structures that link these components together. Optimisation efficiency and resulting ML-model accuracy both suffer if this pipeline search space is unwieldy and excessively large; it becomes an appealing notion to avoid costly evaluations of poorly performing ML components ahead of time. Accordingly, this paper investigates whether, based on previous experience, a pool of available classifiers/regressors can be preemptively culled ahead of initiating a pipeline composition/optimisation process for a new ML problem, i.e. dataset. The previous experience comes in the form of classifier/regressor accuracy rankings derived, with loose assumptions, from a substantial but non-exhaustive number of pipeline evaluations; this meta-knowledge is considered 'opportunistic'. Numerous experiments with the AutoWeka4MCPS package, including ones leveraging similarities between datasets via the relative landmarking method, show that, despite its seeming unreliability, opportunistic meta-knowledge can improve ML outcomes. However, results also indicate that the culling of classifiers/regressors should not be too severe either. In effect, it is better to search through a 'top tier' of recommended predictors than to pin hopes onto one previously supreme performer.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.00282v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.00282v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"exploring-opportunistic-meta-knowledge-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/UTS-AAi/autoweka","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"exploring-opportunistic-meta-knowledge-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/uts-caslab/autoweka","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-learning","task_name":"BIG-bench Machine Learning"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}