Hyperparameter Importance for Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract: Hyperparameter plays an essential role in the fitting of supervised machine learning algorithms. However, it is computationally expensive to tune all the tunable hyperparameters simultaneously especially for large data sets. In this paper, we give a definition of hyperparameter importance that can be estimated by subsampling procedures. According to the importance, hyperparameters can then be tuned on the entire data set more efficiently. We show theoretically that the proposed importance on subsets of data is consistent with the one on the population data under weak conditions. Numerical experiments show that the proposed importance is consistent and can save a lot of computational resources.