Auto-Keras – A Must-Use Open Source Python Package for Automated Machine Learning!

Overview

• Auto-Keras is an open source package built for automated machine learning
• It automatically searches for the hyperparameters of deep learning models
• Plenty of examples are available to help you get started or assist you when you’re stuck

Introduction

Google has been championing AutoML (and with good reason) as the go-to tool for all your AI tasks. They have even released real-world scenarios where AutoML has proven to be more effective than traditional programming tools. But there’s a caveat – it’s a paid service (like so many similar services out there). And while these services may produce good results, there’s always a risk that an open source competitor might supersede it.

With Auto-Keras, that’s exactly what might happen. Auto-Keras is an open source library built for doing automated machine learning based on the popular Keras package. Automated machine learning (AutoML) has recently gained popularity because it makes ML techniques and usage available to non-data science folks. It reduces the technical barrier and allows domain experts to utilise the power of machine learning for their business.

The current version of Auto-Keras provides functions to automatically search for the hyperparameters of deep learning models. It is easy to install, understand, use and has a few examples to help you get started. And of course you can play around with the code and manually change the hyperparameters and other model settings (remember, it’s open source!).

To install Auto-Keras on your machine, paste the below command in your Terminal/Command Prompt window:

pip install autokeras

Check out the full code for Auto Keras on GitHub and also make sure you view all the examples here.

Our take on this

Try it out! It’s free so you have nothing to lose here. Automated ML will be a big thing in the future so it’s good, as a data scientist, to understand what all the current hype is about. Auto-Keras will help you build models with easy and unerring accuracy.

Note that this is not to condone the other AutoML tools out there. These tools were built by data scientists to help other data scientists so they should not be ignored. But when an open source opportunity like this comes along, it instantly becomes a hit in the community. If you do use Auto-Keras, share your experience with us in the comments section below.

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Pranav Dar

Senior Editor at Analytics Vidhya.Data visualization practitioner who loves reading and delving deeper into the data science and machine learning arts. Always looking for new ways to improve processes using ML and AI.