A Grammar of Machine Learning Workflows

Simon Roth
3/11/2026
cs.LG

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Abstract

Data leakage affected 294 published papers across 17 scientific fields (Kapoor & Narayanan, 2023). The dominant response has been documentation: checklists, linters, best-practice guides. Documentation does not prevent these failures. This paper proposes a structural remedy: a grammar that decomposes the supervised learning lifecycle into 7 kernel primitives connected by a typed directed acyclic graph (DAG), with four hard constraints that reject the two most damaging leakage classes at call time. The grammar's core contribution is the terminal assess constraint: a runtime-enforced evaluate/assess boundary where repeated test-set assessment is rejected by a guard on a nominally distinct Evidence type. A companion study across 2,047 experimental instances quantifies why this matters: selection leakage inflates performance by d_z = 0.93 and memorization leakage by d_z = 0.53-1.11. Three separate implementations (Python, R, and Julia) confirm the claims. The appendix specification lets anyone build a conforming version.

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Cite this paper

@article{roth2026grammar,
  title  = {A Grammar of Machine Learning Workflows},
  author = {Simon Roth},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2603.10742},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10742v1}
}

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