Automatic learning algorithm selection for classification via convolutional neural networks

As in any other task, the process of building machine learning models can benefit from prior experience. Meta-learning for classifier selection gains knowledge from characteristics of different datasets and/or previous performance of machine learning techniques to make better decisions for the current modeling process. Meta-learning approaches first collect meta-data that describe this prior experience and then use it as input for an algorithm selection model. In this paper, however, we propose an automatic learning scheme in which we train convolutional networks directly with the information of tabular datasets for binary classification. The goal of this study is to learn the inherent structure of the data without identifying meta-features. Experiments with simulated datasets show that the proposed approach achieves nearly perfect performance in identifying linear and nonlinear patterns, outperforming the traditional two-step method based on meta-features. The proposed method is then applied to real-world datasets, making suggestions about the best classifiers that can be considered based on the structure of the data.