tips.md

Tips

Start With A Dry Run

Before launching a full config, inspect the resolved phase calls:

python run.py -c run_configs/uci_binary_hcc.cfg --dry_run

This catches most path, phase toggle, and parameter-name mistakes early.

Keep Parameter Names Consistent

The current notebooks, .cfg files, and CLI arguments are aligned around the same parameter names where possible. Prefer copying one of the included UCI configs and editing values rather than starting from an empty file.

Choose Metrics By Task

Good defaults:

Task	Metric
Binary classification	balanced_accuracy
Multiclass classification	balanced_accuracy
Regression	explained_variance or pearson_correlation

Use metric_direction = maximize for these defaults. Use minimize for error metrics such as mean absolute error.

Use Replication As External Validation

P10 should be used for data that were not part of training/CV. The included UCI replication folders are deterministic held-out splits for demonstration.

SMOTE Guidance

Enable P2 SMOTE only for classification tasks and only when class imbalance is large enough to justify oversampling:

[p2]
smote = True
smote_method = auto

auto chooses SMOTENC when categorical features are present.

Native Categorical Handling

If P1 uses one_hot_encoding = False, P6 should run only native categorical models unless you explicitly add support for another model. The default native categorical list includes CatBoost/CGB and ExSTraCS.

Faster Test Runs

For quick smoke tests:

• Use n_splits = 3.
• Use a small model list such as NB,LR,DT.
• Lower n_trials.
• Set report enable_plots = False when checking report logic only.
• Use --only or --stop_after for targeted config runs.