Machine learning algorithm search with symbolic programming

Abstract

A method for searching for an output machine learning (ML) algorithm to perform an ML task is described. The method comprising: receiving data specifying an input ML algorithm; receiving data specifying a search algorithm that searches for candidate ML algorithms and an evaluation function that evaluates the performance of candidate ML algorithms; generating data representing a symbolic tree from the input ML algorithm; generating data representing a hyper symbolic tree from the symbolic tree; searching an algorithm search space that defines a set of possible concrete symbolic trees from the hyper symbolic tree for candidate ML algorithms and training the candidate ML algorithms to determine a respective performance metric for each candidate ML algorithm; and selecting one or more trained candidate ML algorithms among the trained candidate ML algorithms based on the determined performance metrics.