Scaling tree-based automated machine learning to biomedical big data with a feature set selector

Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems are helpful data science assistants designed to scan data for novel features, select appropriate supervised learning models and optimize their parameters. For this purpose, Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT) was developed using strongly typed genetic programing (GP) to recommend an optimized analysis pipeline for the data scientist's prediction problem. However, like other AutoML systems, TPOT may reach computational resource limits when working on big data such as whole-genome expression data. We introduce two new features implemented in TPOT that helps increase the system's scalability: Feature Set Selector (FSS) and Template. FSS provides the option to specify subsets of the features as separate datasets, assuming the signals come from one or more of these specific data subsets. FSS increases TPOT's efficiency in application on big data by slicing the entire dataset into smaller sets of features and allowing GP to select the best subset in the final pipeline. Template enforces type constraints with strongly typed GP and enables the incorporation of FSS at the beginning of each pipeline. Consequently, FSS and Template help reduce TPOT computation time and may provide more interpretable results. Our simulations show TPOT-FSS significantly outperforms a tuned XGBoost model and standard TPOT implementation.