Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized model training without centralizing raw data, yet achieving interpretability under such constraints remains challenging. We propose AutoCoRe-FL, a framework for interpretable FL that eliminates the need for predefined or manually labeled concepts. In AutoCoRe-FL, each client automatically extracts high-level visual concepts-clusters of semantically coherent image regions that correspond to human-understandable properties-using local segmentation, self-supervised representation learning, and clustering. These concepts are used to encode data as interpretable vectors, from which clients train symbolic models that generate rule-based explanations. The server then aggregates these rules through an iterative, communication-efficient process to build a global, coherent, and transparent model. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AutoCoRe-FL produces accurate symbolic explanations while achieving competitive predictive performance. Notably, it outperforms LR-XFL-the current state-of-the-art interpretable FL baseline that relies on predefined concept supervision-in both rule quality and classification accuracy.

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has been successful when the learning task is assumed to be static. However, it remains unclear whether AutoML methods can efficiently create online pipelines in dynamic environments. The current online AutoML frameworks primarily focus on supervised learning. However, unsupervised learning, particularly clustering, also requires AutoML solutions, especially with the ambiguity associated with evaluating clustering results. In this paper, we introduce OnlineAutoClust, a framework for online automated clustering for algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning. OnlineAutoClust combines the inherent adaptation capabilities of online learners with automated pipeline optimization using Bayesian optimization. OnlineAutoClust develops a collaborative mechanism based on clustering ensemble to combine optimized pipelines based on different internal cluster validity indices. The proposed framework is based on River library and utilizes five clustering algorithms. Empirical evaluation on several real and synthetic data streams with varying types of concept drift demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to existing methods

Feature engineering is a crucial step in building well-performing machine learning pipelines. However, manually constructing highly predictive features is time-consuming and requires domain knowledge. Although the research area of automated feature engineering has attracted much interest lately, both in academia and industry, the scalability and efficiency of the existing systems and tools are still practically unsatisfactory. This paper presents a scalable and interpretable automated feature engineering framework, BigFeat, that optimizes input features’ quality to maximize the predictive performance according to a user-defined metric. BigFeat employs a dynamic feature generation and selection mechanism that constructs a set of expressive features that improve the prediction performance while retaining interpretability. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results show that BigFeat provides superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art automated feature engineering framework, AutoFeat, on a wide range of datasets. We show that BigFeat significantly improves the F1-Score of 8 classifiers by 4.59%, on average. In addition, the performance improvement achieved by integrating BigFeat into different AutoML frameworks is higher than that achieved by integrating AutoFeat into the same frameworks. Besides, the scalability of BigFeat is confirmed by its linear complexity, parallel design, and execution time which is, on average, 22x faster than AutoFeat.

Novel technologies in automated machine learning ease the complexity of algorithm selection and hyper-parameter optimization. However, these are usually restricted to supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression, while unsupervised learning remains a largely unexplored problem. In this paper, we offer a solution for automating machine learning specifically for the case of unsupervised learning with clustering, in a domain-agnostic manner. This is achieved through a combination of state-of-the-art processes based on meta-learning for algorithm and evaluation criteria selection, and evolutionary algorithm for hyper-parameter tuning. We introduce a robust and scalable interactive tool, named cSmartML, built on scikit-learn with 8 clustering algorithms. In order to capture more than a single measure of goodness of the output clustering solution, cSmartML optimizes multiple objective functions. A pareto-approach evaluates each objective simultaneously for each clustering solution. On each of the 27 real and synthetic benchmark datasets, we show that the performance of cSmartML is often much better than using standard selection and hyper-parameter optimization methods. In addition, experimentation reveals that cSmartML takes advantage of the defined objective functions on multi-objective functions framework.