Towards Automated Machine Learning: Evaluation and Comparison of AutoML Approaches and Tools

--There has been considerable growth and interest in industrial applications of machine learning (ML) in recent years. ML engineers, as a consequence, are in high demand across the industry, yet improving the efficiency of ML engineers remains a fundamental challenge. Automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a way to save time and effort on repetitive tasks in ML pipelines, such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and prediction result analysis. In this paper, we investigate the current state of AutoML tools aiming to automate these tasks. We conduct various evaluations of the tools on many datasets, in different data segments, to examine their performance, and compare their advantages and disadvantages on different test cases. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) promises major productivity boosts for data scientists, ML engineers and ML researchers by reducing repetitive tasks in machine learning pipelines. There are currently a number of different tools and platforms (both open-source and commercially available solutions) that try to automate these tasks. The goal of this paper is to address the following questions: (i) what are the available ML functionalities provided by the tools; (ii) how the tools perform when facing a wide spectrum of real world datasets; (iii) find the tradeoff between optimization speed and accuracy of the results; and (iv) the reproducibility of the results (a.k.a.