A Configuration-First Framework for Reproducible, Low-Code Machine Learning: a Localization Use Case

As machine learning underpins more critical applications, the value of a reported result depends on whether it can be compared and repeated. In practice, this remains difficult: research groups often assemble their own tools for configuration, execution, versioning, and evaluation, while also repeating the domain-specific work such as dataset preparation and baseline implementation. We present a configuration-first design for application-specific ML experimentation frameworks that addresses these sources of repeated effort. An experiment is declared in human-readable configuration files; a workflow orchestrator executes each stage as an isolated process that communicates only through explicit inputs and outputs; and code, data, configurations, environment specifications, and generated artifacts are versioned together, so that a recorded run can be inspected and repeated. We instantiate the design as LOCALIZE for radio-localization research, which supplies preconfigured datasets, processing stages, model-development procedures, and experiment templates while leaving the underlying pipeline open to modification. A qualitative comparison against five experimentation platforms, together with controlled quantitative studies against matched Jupyter notebook and Kedro implementations, shows that for the localization workflows studied, changes covered by LOCALIZE's supplied components require fewer codebase edits, while total wall-clock time and peak memory usage remain comparable. In a controlled scaling experiment at 1x, 5x, and 10x the base dataset volume, total CPU and wall time grew sublinearly over the tested sizes.