Seneca: Fast and Low Cost Hyperparameter Search for Machine Learning Models

The goal of our work is to simplify and expedite the construction and evaluation of machine learning models using autoscaled cloud computing resources. To enable this, we develop an open source system called Seneca, which leverages the serverless programming model and its implementation in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda. Seneca takes a machine learning application, dataset, and a list of possible hyperparameter options as input and automatically constructs an AWS Lambda function. The function ingresses and splits the input dataset into training and testing subsets and constructs, tests, and evaluates (i.e. scores) a machine learning model for a given set of hyperparameter values. Seneca concurrently invokes functions for all combinations of the hyperparameters specified. It then returns the configuration (or model) that results in the best score to the user. In this paper, we overview the design and implementation of Seneca, and empirically evaluate its performance for a popular classification application.