
O’Reilly Media’s chief data scientist Ben Lorica (
@bigdata) posted
an article on the popular Radar Blog covering some of our research on analyzing/tuning optimization algorithms! As Ben points out, machine learning projects in practice consist of pipelines — complex sequences of algorithms that are tailored to the particular task at hand. As the pipelines become larger and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain them and to predict how changes in one component will affect other components downstream. Our work (see arxiv paper
here) takes important steps towards the analysis and design of such pipelines by bringing to bear tools from robust control theory.