# The Machine Learning Bazaar: Harnessing the ML Ecosystem for Effective System Development

## TL;DR

The paper introduces the Machine Learning Bazaar, a comprehensive framework that unifies ML components, automates pipeline creation, and supports multi-task AutoML across diverse data types and problem domains.

## Contribution

It presents a novel unified API for ML primitives, a pipeline composition approach, and a multi-task AutoML system capable of handling various data modalities and problem types.

## Key findings

- Demonstrated 5 real-world use cases.
- Evaluated over 456 ML tasks.
- Searched through 2.5 million pipelines.

## Abstract

As machine learning is applied more widely, data scientists often struggle to find or create end-to-end machine learning systems for specific tasks. The proliferation of libraries and frameworks and the complexity of the tasks have led to the emergence of "pipeline jungles" - brittle, ad hoc ML systems. To address these problems, we introduce the Machine Learning Bazaar, a new framework for developing machine learning and automated machine learning software systems. First, we introduce ML primitives, a unified API and specification for data processing and ML components from different software libraries. Next, we compose primitives into usable ML pipelines, abstracting away glue code, data flow, and data storage. We further pair these pipelines with a hierarchy of AutoML strategies - Bayesian optimization and bandit learning. We use these components to create a general-purpose, multi-task, end-to-end AutoML system that provides solutions to a variety of data modalities (image, text, graph, tabular, relational, etc.) and problem types (classification, regression, anomaly detection, graph matching, etc.). We demonstrate 5 real-world use cases and 2 case studies of our approach. Finally, we present an evaluation suite of 456 real-world ML tasks and describe the characteristics of 2.5 million pipelines searched over this task suite.