Eight years of AutoML: categorisation, review and trends

Abstract

Knowledge extraction through machine learning techniques has been successfully applied in a large number of application domains. However, apart from the required technical knowledge and background in the application domain, it usually involves a number of time-consuming and repetitive steps. Automated machine learning (AutoML) emerged in 2014 as an attempt to mitigate these issues, making machine learning methods more practicable to both data scientists and domain experts. AutoML is a broad area encompassing a wide range of approaches aimed at addressing a diversity of tasks over the different phases of the knowledge discovery process being automated with specific techniques. To provide a big picture of the whole area, we have conducted a systematic literature review based on a proposed taxonomy that permits categorising 447 primary studies selected from a search of 31,048 papers. This review performs an extensive and rigorous analysis of the AutoML field, scrutinising how the primary studies have addressed the dimensions of the taxonomy, and identifying any gaps that remain unexplored as well as potential future trends. The analysis of these studies has yielded some intriguing findings. For instance, we have observed a significant growth in the number of publications since 2018. Additionally, it is noteworthy that the algorithm selection problem has gradually been superseded by the challenge of workflow composition, which automates more than one phase of the knowledge discovery process simultaneously. Of all the tasks in AutoML, the growth of neural architecture search is particularly noticeable.