DeepLine: AutoML Tool for Pipelines Generation using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Hierarchical Actions Filtering

TL;DR

DeepLine is an AutoML tool that uses deep reinforcement learning with hierarchical actions filtering to efficiently generate end-to-end machine learning pipelines, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and computational cost.

Contribution

This paper introduces DeepLine, a novel reinforcement learning approach with hierarchical actions filtering for automatic pipeline generation in AutoML.

Findings

DeepLine outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy.

DeepLine reduces computational costs significantly.

Hierarchical-actions plugin accelerates training process.

Abstract

Automatic machine learning (AutoML) is an area of research aimed at automating machine learning (ML) activities that currently require human experts. One of the most challenging tasks in this field is the automatic generation of end-to-end ML pipelines: combining multiple types of ML algorithms into a single architecture used for end-to-end analysis of previously-unseen data. This task has two challenging aspects: the first is the need to explore a large search space of algorithms and pipeline architectures. The second challenge is the computational cost of training and evaluating multiple pipelines. In this study we present DeepLine, a reinforcement learning based approach for automatic pipeline generation. Our proposed approach utilizes an efficient representation of the search space and leverages past knowledge gained from previously-analyzed datasets to make the problem more tractable. Additionally, we propose a novel hierarchical-actions algorithm that serves as a plugin, mediating the environment-agent interaction in deep reinforcement learning problems. The plugin significantly speeds up the training process of our model. Evaluation on 56 datasets shows that DeepLine outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both in accuracy and in computational cost.