Automated Machine Learning -- A Paradigm Shift That Accelerates Data Scientist Productivity @ Airbnb

At Airbnb, we are always searching for ways to improve our data science workflow. A fair amount of our data science projects involve machine learning, and many parts of this workflow are repetitive. Exploratory Data Analysis: Visualizing data before embarking on a modeling exercise is a crucial step in machine learning. Automating tasks such as plotting all your variables against the target variable being predicted as well as computing summary statistics can save lots of time. Feature Transformations: There are many choices in how you can encode categorical variables, impute missing values, encode sequences and text, etc.