PipelineProfiler: A Visual Analytics Tool for the Exploration of AutoML Pipelines

Abstract: In recent years, a wide variety of automated machine learning (AutoML) methods have been proposed to search and generate end-to-end learning pipelines. While these techniques facilitate the creation of models for real-world applications, given their black-box nature, the complexity of the underlying algorithms, and the large number of pipelines they derive, it is difficult for their developers to debug these systems. It is also challenging for machine learning experts to select an AutoML system that is well suited for a given problem or class of problems. In this paper, we present the PipelineProfiler, an interactive visualization tool that allows the exploration and comparison of the solution space of ML pipelines produced by AutoML systems. PipelineProfiler is integrated with Jupyter Notebook and can be used together with common data science tools to enable a rich set of analyses of the ML pipelines and provide insights about the algorithms that generated them. We demonstrate the utility of our tool through several use cases where PipelineProfiler is used to better understand and improve a real-world AutoML system. Furthermore, we validate our approach by presenting a detailed analysis of a think-aloud experiment with six data scientists who develop and evaluate AutoML tools.