Adaptive Bayesian Linear Regression for Automated Machine Learning

To solve a machine learning problem, one typically needs to perform data preprocessing, modeling, and hyperparameter tuning, which is known as model selection and hyperparameter optimization.The goal of automated machine learning (AutoML) is to design methods that can automatically perform model selection and hyperparameter optimization without human interventions for a given dataset. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method that can search for a high-performance machine learning pipeline from the predefined set of candidate pipelines for supervised classification datasets in an efficient way by leveraging meta-data collected from previous experiments. More specifically, our method combines an adaptive Bayesian regression model with a neural network basis function and the acquisition function from Bayesian optimization. The adaptive Bayesian regression model is able to capture knowledge from previous meta-data and thus make predictions of the performances of machine learning pipelines on a new dataset. The acquisition function is then used to guide the search of possible pipelines based on the predictions.The experiments demonstrate that our approach can quickly identify high-performance pipelines for a range of test datasets and outperforms the baseline methods.Comment: Added references;Corrected typos.Revised argument,results unchange

Benchmarking the Neural Linear Model for Regression

The neural linear model is a simple adaptive Bayesian linear regression method that has recently been used in a number of problems ranging from Bayesian optimization to reinforcement learning. Despite its apparent successes in these settings, to the best of our knowledge there has been no systematic exploration of its capabilities on simple regression tasks. In this work we characterize these on the UCI datasets, a popular benchmark for Bayesian regression models, as well as on the recently introduced UCI "gap" datasets, which are better tests of out-of-distribution uncertainty. We demonstrate that the neural linear model is a simple method that shows generally good performance on these tasks, but at the cost of requiring good hyperparameter tuning.Comment: Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference (AABI 2019