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A systematic study comparing hyperparameter optimization engines on tabular data

2023/11/27 by Balázs Kégl, Kegl, Balazs · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Data Stream Mining Techniques #Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning and Data Classification

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.15854

openalex publication_date 2023/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We run an independent comparison of all hyperparameter optimization (hyperopt) engines available in the Ray Tune library. We introduce two ways to normalize and aggregate statistics across data sets and models, one rank-based, and another one sandwiching the score between the random search score and the full grid search score. This affords us i) to rank the hyperopt engines, ii) to make generalized and statistically significant statements on how much they improve over random search, and iii) to make recommendations on which engine should be used to hyperopt a given learning algorithm. We find that most engines beat random search, but that only three of them (HEBO, AX, and BlendSearch) clearly stand out. We also found that some engines seem to specialize in hyperopting certain learning algorithms, which makes it tricky to use hyperopt in comparison studies, since the choice of the hyperopt technique may favor some of the models in the comparison.

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