I've written up a few meta-estimator parsers for things like log1p target transforming (i.e. the TransformedTargetRegressor when the transform/inverse are fixed to np.log1p/np.expm1) or multi-model regression (i.e. multiple models running regression over the same input pipeline), and in both of them I've had to use _parse_sklearn within their parser functions to handle parsing the inner estimators. It would be nice to make this public, to support meta-estimators that can't be precisely expressed using combinations of Pipeline or FeatureUnion (e.g. an estimator that scales some regression by a classifier probability).