Meta-learning for symbolic hyperparameter defaults

Pieter Gijsbers, Joaquin Vanschoren, Florian Pfisterer, Jan N. van Rijn, Bernd Bischl

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Hyperparameter optimization in machine learning (ML) deals with the problem of empirically learning an optimal algorithm configuration from data, usually formulated as a black-box optimization problem. In this work, we propose a zero-shot method to meta-learn symbolic default hyperparameter configurations that are expressed in terms of the properties of the dataset. This enables a much faster, but still data-dependent, configuration of the ML algorithm, compared to standard hyperparameter optimization approaches. In the past, symbolic and static default values have usually been obtained as hand-crafted heuristics. We propose an approach of learning such symbolic configurations as formulas of dataset properties from a large set of prior evaluations on multiple datasets by optimizing over a grammar of expressions using an evolutionary algorithm. We evaluate our method on surrogate empirical performance models as well as on real data across 6 ML algorithms on more than 100 datasets and demonstrate that our method indeed finds viable symbolic defaults.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGECCO 2021 Companion - Proceedings of the 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages151-152
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-8351-6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2021

Bibliographical note

2-page GECCO poster paper, full length original submission available as preprint on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05767v2

Keywords

  • hyperparameter optimization
  • metalearning

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