ml-antipattern-validator
Prevents 30+ critical AI/ML mistakes including data leakage, evaluation errors, training pitfalls, and deployment issues. Use when working with ML training, testing, model evaluation, or deployment.
When & Why to Use This Skill
The ML Antipattern Validator is a specialized Claude skill designed to identify and prevent over 30 critical AI and Machine Learning mistakes. It ensures the integrity of ML pipelines by detecting data leakage, evaluation errors, and training pitfalls, helping developers move from impressive but misleading metrics to honest, robust model evaluations. By automating the detection of common ML bugs, it streamlines the code review process for data scientists and ML engineers.
Use Cases
- Detecting target and temporal leakage in dataset preparation to prevent over-optimistic performance results.
- Validating evaluation methodologies to ensure metrics align with business objectives, especially when dealing with imbalanced datasets.
- Reviewing training scripts for technical pitfalls such as incorrect Batch Normalization modes or improper early stopping configurations.
- Verifying cross-validation strategies for time-series data to ensure no future data is used to predict the past.
- Checking for preprocessing leakage where scalers or encoders are incorrectly fitted on the entire dataset instead of just the training split.
| name | ml-antipattern-validator |
|---|---|
| description | Prevents 30+ critical AI/ML mistakes including data leakage, evaluation errors, training pitfalls, and deployment issues. Use when working with ML training, testing, model evaluation, or deployment. |
ML Antipattern Validator
Overview
AI/ML 개발에서 30+ 안티패턴을 감지하고 방지하는 스킬입니다.
Key Principle: Honest evaluation > Impressive metrics.
When to Activate
Automatic Triggers:
- ML training code (
train*.py, model training) - Dataset preparation or splitting
- Model evaluation or testing
- Production deployment planning
Manual Triggers:
@validate-ml- Full validation@check-leakage- Data leakage detection@verify-eval- Evaluation methodology
Pre-Implementation Checklist
✅ Requirements:
□ Problem clearly defined with success metrics
□ Train/test split strategy defined
□ Evaluation methodology matches business objective
✅ Data Integrity:
□ No temporal leakage (future → past)
□ No target leakage (answer in features)
□ No preprocessing leakage (fit on all data)
□ No group leakage (related samples split)
✅ Evaluation Setup:
□ Test set completely held out
□ Metrics aligned with business objective
□ Baseline models defined
Critical Antipatterns
Category 1: Data Leakage 🚨
1.1 Target Leakage
❌ WRONG: Using "refund_issued" to predict "purchase_fraud"
✅ CORRECT: Only use features available at purchase time
1.2 Temporal Leakage
❌ WRONG: train = df[df['date'] > '2024-06-01'] # Future data
✅ CORRECT: train = df[df['date'] < '2024-06-01'] # Past for training
1.3 Preprocessing Leakage
❌ WRONG: X_scaled = scaler.fit_transform(X); train_test_split(X_scaled)
✅ CORRECT: Split first, then scaler.fit(X_train)
1.4 Group Leakage
❌ WRONG: train_test_split(df) # Same user in both sets
✅ CORRECT: GroupShuffleSplit(groups=df['user_id'])
1.5 Data Augmentation Leakage
❌ WRONG: augment(X) → train_test_split()
✅ CORRECT: train_test_split() → augment(X_train)
Category 2: Evaluation Mistakes ⚠️
2.1 Testing on Training Data
❌ WRONG: evaluate(model, training_data)
✅ CORRECT: evaluate(model, unseen_test_data)
2.2 Metric Misalignment
Business Objective → Appropriate Metric:
- Ranking → NDCG, MRR, MAP
- Imbalanced → F1, Precision@K, AUC-PR
- Balanced → Accuracy, AUC-ROC
2.3 Accuracy Paradox
❌ WRONG: 99% accuracy on 99:1 imbalanced data
✅ CORRECT: Check per-class metrics with classification_report()
2.4 Invalid Time Series CV
❌ WRONG: cross_val_score(model, X, y, cv=5) # Shuffles time!
✅ CORRECT: TimeSeriesSplit(n_splits=5)
2.5 Hyperparameter Tuning on Test Set
❌ WRONG: grid_search(model, X_test, y_test)
✅ CORRECT: train/validation/test three-way split
Category 3: Training Pitfalls 🔧
3.1 Batch Norm Inference Error
❌ WRONG: predictions = model(X_test) # Still in train mode
✅ CORRECT: model.eval(); with torch.no_grad(): predictions = model(X_test)
3.2 Early Stopping Overfitting
❌ WRONG: EarlyStopping(patience=50)
✅ CORRECT: EarlyStopping(patience=5, min_delta=0.001, restore_best_weights=True)
3.3 Learning Rate Warmup
✅ CORRECT: get_linear_schedule_with_warmup(num_warmup_steps=1000)
3.4 Class Imbalance
❌ WRONG: CrossEntropyLoss() # Biased toward majority
✅ CORRECT: CrossEntropyLoss(weight=class_weights)
Detection Patterns
Leakage Detection
# Check feature-target correlation
correlation = df[features].corrwith(df['target'])
if (correlation.abs() > 0.95).any():
raise DataLeakageError("Suspiciously high correlation")
# Check temporal ordering
if train['date'].min() > test['date'].max():
raise TemporalLeakageError("Training on future, testing on past")
# Check group overlap
if train_groups & test_groups:
raise GroupLeakageError("Overlapping groups")
Mode Check
if model.training:
raise InferenceModeError("Model in training mode during evaluation")
Validation Checklist
Before deployment:
- No data leakage detected
- Test set never seen during training
- Metrics aligned with business objective
- model.eval() called for inference
- Class imbalance handled
- Covariate shift monitoring planned
References
상세 예시 및 시나리오는 references/REFERENCE.md 참조.