Automatically Debugging AutoML Pipelines using Maro: ML Automated Remediation Oracle (Extended Version)

Abstract: Machine learning in practice often involves complex pipelines for data cleansing, feature engineering, preprocessing, and prediction. These pipelines are composed of operators, which have to be correctly connected and whose hyperparameters must be correctly configured. Unfortunately, it is quite common for certain combinations of datasets, operators, or hyperparameters to cause failures. Diagnosing and fixing those failures is tedious and error-prone and can seriously derail a data scientist's workflow. This paper describes an approach for automatically debugging an ML pipeline, explaining the failures, and producing a remediation. We implemented our approach, which builds on a combination of AutoML and SMT, in a tool called Maro. Maro works seamlessly with the familiar data science ecosystem including Python, Jupyter notebooks, scikit-learn, and AutoML tools such as Hyperopt. We empirically evaluate our tool and find that for most cases, a single remediation automatically fixes errors, produces no additional faults, and does not significantly impact optimal accuracy nor time to convergence.