When you start to learn anything new, or build on your existing knowledge, it's important to understand the background of things and how the story has evolved over time, knowing that the current trends were a natural evolution of conventional reporting, business intelligence (BI), and analytics. That's why the initial chapters walked you through the background and fundamentals of ML pipelines, such as data preprocessing, automated algorithm selection, and hyperparameter optimization.
Due to the highly experimental nature of AutoML pipelines, there were many concepts explained together with their practical examples.
The ideas that advanced analytics and ML use to solve problems are not necessarily new, but they are only usable now as people have easy access to cheaper hardware and software resources. More advanced technologies...