Meta-Learning has been largely used over the last years to support the recommendation of the most suitable machine learning algorithm(s) and hyperparameters for new datasets. Traditionally, a meta-base is created containing meta-features extracted from several datasets along with the performance of a pool of machine learning algorithms when applied to these datasets. The meta-features must describe essential aspects of the dataset and distinguish different problems and solutions. However, if one wants the use of Meta-Learning to be computationally efficient, the extraction of the meta-feature values should also show a low computational cost, considering a trade-off between the time spent to run all the algorithms and the time required to extract the meta-features. One class of measures with successful results in the characterization of classification datasets is concerned with estimating the underlying complexity of the classification problem. These data complexity measures take into account the overlap between classes imposed by the feature values, the separability of the classes and distribution of the instances within the classes. However, the extraction of these measures from datasets usually presents a high computational cost. In this paper, we propose an empirical approach designed to decrease the computational cost of computing the data complexity measures, while still keeping their descriptive ability. The proposal consists of a novel Meta-Learning system able to predict the values of the data complexity measures for a dataset by using simpler meta-features as input. In an extensive set of experiments, we show that the predictive performance achieved by Meta-Learning systems which use the predicted data complexity measures is similar to the performance obtained using the original data complexity measures, but the computational cost involved in their computation is significantly reduced.

Automated recommendation of machine learning algorithms is receiving a large deal of attention, not only because they can recommend the most suitable algorithms for a new task, but also because they can support efficient hyper-parameter tuning, leading to better machine learning solutions. The automated recommendation can be implemented using meta-learning, learning from previous learning experiences, to create a meta-model able to associate a data set to the predictive performance of machine learning algorithms. Although a large number of publications report the use of meta-learning, reproduction and comparison of meta-learning experiments is a difficult task. The literature lacks extensive and comprehensive public tools that enable the reproducible investigation of the different meta-learning approaches. An alternative to deal with this difficulty is to develop a meta-feature extractor package with the main characterization measures, following uniform guidelines that facilitate the use and inclusion of new meta-features. In this paper, we propose two Meta-Feature Extractor (MFE) packages, written in both Python and R, to fill this lack. The packages follow recent frameworks for meta-feature extraction, aiming to facilitate the reproducibility of meta-learning experiments.