Benchmarking AutoML algorithms on a collection of synthetic classification problems

Automated machine learning (AutoML) algorithms have grown in popularity due to their high performance and flexibility to adapt to different problems and data sets. With the increasing number of AutoML algorithms, deciding which would best suit a given problem becomes increasingly more work. Therefore, it is essential to use complex and challenging benchmarks which would be able to differentiate the AutoML algorithms from each other. This paper compares the performance of four different AutoML algorithms: Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT), Auto-Sklearn, Auto-Sklearn 2, and H2O AutoML. We use the Diverse and Generative ML benchmark (DIGEN), a diverse set of synthetic datasets derived from generative functions designed to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the performance of common machine learning algorithms. We confirm that AutoML can identify pipelines that perform well on all included datasets. Most AutoML algorithms performed similarly without much room for improvement; however, some were more consistent than others at finding high-performing solutions for some datasets.