Why AutoML Is An Essential New Tool For Data Scientists

Machine learning (ML) is the current paradigm for modeling statistical phenomena by harnessing algorithms that exploit computer intelligence. It is common place to build ML models that predict housing prices, aggregate users by their potential marketing interests, and use image recognition techniques to identify brain tumors. However, up until now these models have required scrupulous trial and error in order to optimize model performance on unseen data. The advent of automated machine learning (AutoML) aims to curb the resources required (time and expertise) by offering well-designed pipelines that handle data preprocessing, feature selection, and model creation and evaluation. While AutoML may initially only appeal to enterprises that want to harness the power of ML without consuming precious budgets and hiring skilled data practitioners, it also contains very strong promise to become an invaluable tool for the experienced data scientist.