Xinyuan Lin: Data Science Tasks Implemented with Scripts versus GUI-Based Workflows: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Abstract: As leveraging large-scale data analytics becomes the norm for many applications, platforms for developing these capabilities have become increasingly important. This work compares the benefits and drawbacks of implementing two commonly used data science platform paradigms: code-based scripts and GUI-based workflows. We implement tasks in both paradigms that provide examples of phases in the typical life cycle of a data science project, including data wrangling, machine learning (ML) model training, and inference. In this talk, we will examine the relative performance of the implementations under each paradigm in various experimental settings. We will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each platform implementation and provide a foundation for future work in comparing data science platform paradigms.