The success of machine learning in a broad range of applications has led to an ever-growing demand for machine learning systems that can be used off the shelf by non-experts. To be effective in practice, such systems need to automatically choose a good algorithm and feature preprocessing steps for a new dataset at hand, and also set their respective hyperparameters. Recent work has started to tackle this automated machine learning (AutoML) problem with the help of efficient Bayesian optimization methods. Building on this, we introduce a robust new AutoML system based on the Python machine learning package scikit-learn (using 15 classifiers, 14 feature preprocessing methods, and 4 data preprocessing methods, giving rise to a structured hypothesis space with 110 hyperparameters). This system, which we dub Auto-sklearn, improves on existing AutoML methods by automatically taking into account past performance on similar datasets, and by constructing ensembles from the models evaluated during the optimization. Our system won six out of ten phases of the first ChaLearn AutoML challenge, and our comprehensive analysis on over 100 diverse datasets shows that it substantially outperforms the previous state of the art in AutoML. We also demonstrate the performance gains due to each of our contributions and derive insights into the effectiveness of the individual components of Auto-sklearn.

Recent interest in complex and computationally expensive machine learning models with many hyperparameters, such as automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks and deep neural networks, has resulted in a resurgence of research on hyperparameter optimization (HPO). In this chapter, we give an overview of the most prominent approaches for HPO. We first discuss blackbox function optimization methods based on model-free methods and Bayesian optimization. Since the high computational demand of many modern machine learning applications renders pure blackbox optimization extremely costly, we next focus on modern multi-fidelity methods that use (much) cheaper variants of the blackbox function to approximately assess the quality of hyperparameter settings. Lastly, we point to open problems and future research directions. 1.1 Introduction Every machine learning system has hyperparameters, and the most basic task in automated machine learning (AutoML) is to automatically set these hyperparameters to optimize performance. Especially recent deep neural networks crucially depend on a wide range of hyperparameter choices about the neural network's architecture, regularization, and optimization. Automated hyperparameter optimization (HPO) has several important use cases; it can • reduce the human effort necessary for applying machine learning. This is particularly important in the context of AutoML.

Recent advances in AutoML have led to automated tools that can compete with machine learning experts on supervised learning tasks. In this work, we present two versions of Auto-Net, which provide automatically-tuned deep neural networks without any human intervention. The first version, Auto-Net 1.0, builds upon ideas from the competition-winning system Auto-sklearn by using the Bayesian Optimization method SMAC and uses Lasagne as the underlying deep learning (DL) library. The more recent Auto-Net 2.0 builds upon a recent combination of Bayesian Optimization and HyperBand, called BOHB, and uses PyTorch as DL library. To the best of our knowledge, Auto-Net 1.0 was the first automatically-tuned neural network to win competition datasets against human experts (as part of the first AutoML challenge). Further empirical results show that ensembling Auto-Net 1.0 with Auto-sklearn can perform better than either approach alone, and that Auto-Net 2.0 can perform better yet.

We advocate the use of curated, comprehensive benchmark suites of machine learning datasets, backed by standardized OpenML-based interfaces and complementary software toolkits written in Python, Java and R. Major distinguishing features of OpenML benchmark suites are (a) ease of use through standardized data formats, APIs, and existing client libraries; (b) machine-readable meta-information regarding the contents of the suite; and (c) online sharing of results, enabling large scale comparisons. As a first such suite, we propose the OpenML100, a machine learning benchmark suite of 100 classification datasets carefully curated from the thousands of datasets available on OpenML.org.

Model selection and hyperparameter optimization is crucial in applying machine learning to a novel dataset. Recently, a subcommunity of machine learning has focused on solving this problem with Sequential Model-based Bayesian Optimization (SMBO), demonstrating substantial successes in many applications. However, for computationally expensive algorithms the overhead of hyperparameter optimization can still be prohibitive. In this paper we mimic a strategy human domain experts use: speed up optimization by starting from promising configurations that performed well on similar datasets. The resulting initialization technique integrates naturally into the generic SMBO framework and can be trivially applied to any SMBO method. To validate our approach, we perform extensive experiments with two established SMBO frameworks (Spearmint and SMAC) with complementary strengths; optimizing two machine learning frameworks on 57 datasets. Our initialization procedure yields mild improvements for low-dimensional hyperparameter optimization and substantially improves the state of the art for the more complex combined algorithm selection and hyperparameter optimization problem.

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Bayesian optimization has become a standard technique for hyperparameter optimization, including data-intensive models such as deep neural networks that may take days or weeks to train. We consider the setting where previous optimization runs are available, and we wish to use their results to warm-start a new optimization run. We develop an ensemble model that can incorporate the results of past optimization runs, while avoiding the poor scaling that comes with putting all results into a single Gaussian process model. The ensemble combines models from past runs according to estimates of their generalization performance on the current optimization. Results from a large collection of hyperparameter optimization benchmark problems and from optimization of a production computer vision platform at Facebook show that the ensemble can substantially reduce the time it takes to obtain near-optimal configurations, and is useful for warm-starting expensive searches or running quick re-optimizations.

Algorithm parameters, in particular hyperparameters of machine learning algorithms, can substantially impact their performance. To support users in determining well-performing hyperparameter configurations for their algorithms, datasets and applications at hand, SMAC3 offers a robust and flexible framework for Bayesian Optimization, which can improve performance within a few evaluations. It offers several facades and pre-sets for typical use cases, such as optimizing hyperparameters, solving low dimensional continuous (artificial) global optimization problems and configuring algorithms to perform well across multiple problem instances. The SMAC3 package is available under a permissive BSD-license at https://github.com/automl/SMAC3.