Pipeline
An automated, sequential chain of processing steps where the output of one machine learning component serves directly as the input to the next.
Think of It Like This
Like a factory assembly line where one robot cleans the part, the next paints it, and the final one inspects it for quality.
In ML, pipelines encapsulate everything from raw data ingestion and feature scaling to model training and deployment. Frameworks like Scikit-Learn explicitly define Pipeline objects to ensure data transformations are applied consistently across training and inference. This eliminates insidious bugs like data leakage and online/offline skew.