# The Machine Learning Bazaar: Harnessing the ML Ecosystem for Effective System Development

Authors: Smith, Micah J. and Sala, Carles and Kanter, James Max and Veeramachaneni, Kalyan

Abstract: As machine learning is applied more widely, data scientists often struggle to find or create end-to-end machine learning systems for specific tasks. The proliferation of libraries and frameworks and the complexity of the tasks have led to the emergence of "pipeline jungles" - brittle, ad hoc ML systems. To address these problems, we introduce the Machine Learning Bazaar, a new framework for developing machine learning and automated machine learning software systems. First, we introduce ML primitives, a unified API and specification for data processing and ML components from different software libraries. Next, we compose primitives into usable ML pipelines, abstracting away glue code, data flow, and data storage. We further pair these pipelines with a hierarchy of AutoML strategies - Bayesian optimization and bandit learning. We use these components to create a general-purpose, multi-task, end-to-end AutoML system that provides solutions to a variety of data modalities (image, text, graph, tabular, relational, etc.) and problem types (classification, regression, anomaly detection, graph matching, etc.). We demonstrate 5 real-world use cases and 2 case studies of our approach. Finally, we present an evaluation suite of 456 real-world ML tasks and describe the characteristics of 2.5 million pipelines searched over this task suite.

### Citation (Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition)

Smith, Micah J., Carles Sala, James Max Kanter, and Kalyan Veeramachaneni. 2020. “The Machine Learning Bazaar: Harnessing the ML Ecosystem for Effective System Development.” In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 785–800. SIGMOD ’20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3318464.3386146.

### BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3318464.3386146,
author = {Smith, Micah J. and Sala, Carles and Kanter, James Max and Veeramachaneni, Kalyan},
title = {The Machine Learning Bazaar: Harnessing the ML Ecosystem for Effective System Development},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450367356},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3318464.3386146},
doi = {10.1145/3318464.3386146},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data},
pages = {785–800},
numpages = {16},
keywords = {software development, ML pipelines, ML primitives, machine learning, AutoML},
location = {Portland, OR, USA},
series = {SIGMOD '20}
}