What is the machine learning lifecycle represent? Automatically learning without being pre-programmed is possible thanks to machine learning. But what exactly is a machine learning system, and how does it work? So, it is classified as a machine learning life cycle. The machine learning life cycle is a cyclical process for producing a successful machine learning initiative. The main aim of the life cycle is to come up with an answer to the problem or project.
What is the machine learning lifecycle?
Many different job titles are included in the field of machine learning, including business managers, data scientists, and DevOps engineers. A good grasp of the machine learning lifecycle model development process will assist you in correctly allocating resources and determining where you stand in it.
Creating a machine learning model is an iterative process. The majority of the stages are repeated many times for a successful deployment to get the best results. After deployment, the model must be kept up to date and adapted to changing conditions.
The machine learning life cycle is the cyclical path followed by data science projects. It describes each stage in an organization’s process for gaining practical business value from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)
Making a model in the ML project involves three distinct phases: data preparation, model development, and deployment. All three of these components are necessary for generating high-quality models that will add value to your organization. We refer to this procedure as a cycle because the insights gained from the current model will influence and define the next model to be deployed when it is properly completed.
The most crucial aspect of the entire process is to understand the problem and the purpose it serves clearly. As a result, we must first understand the issue before beginning the life cycle because better knowledge will lead to a better outcome.
Let’s go through each stage of the machine learning lifecycle. If you want to look at the history of machine learning before you start, we have a comprehensive article for you.
Data preparation
A significant amount of data is necessary for training machine learning algorithms. The data must be accurate, clean, and relevant to the goal we want our model to achieve. Correctly preparing your data will save you a lot of time fixing your model later.
In the life cycle as a whole, to solve an issue, we generate a machine learning system known as a “model” and train it. However, to teach a model, we require data; therefore, beginning with gathering data is important.
Data gathering
The first stage of the machine learning life cycle is data gathering. The objective of this phase is to discover and collect any data-related issues.
The importance of this stage cannot be overstated. We’ll use it to gather information from various sources, including files, databases, the internet, and mobile devices. It’s one of the most crucial phases in the life cycle. The amount and quality of the data collected will impact the output’s effectiveness. Because there is more data, predictions will be more accurate.
The following activities are included in this step:
- Examine several data sources
- Collect data
- Transform the data from various sources into a single, consistent picture.
We obtain a coherent set of data, often known as a dataset, by completing the above operation. It will be utilized in future stages. So, these are some datasets finders that you can get help for this phase:
- Google Dataset Search: Dataset Search, like Google Scholar, allows you to look for data throughout the web. It can access datasets from various sources, including publishers’ sites, digital libraries, and authors’ websites. It’s an excellent dataset finder that has over 25 million datasets.
- Kaggle: Kaggle has a large pool of data for all levels of expertise, from the novice to the professional.
- UCI Machine Learning Repository: The Machine Learning Repository at UCI is a one-stop shop for open-source datasets.
- VisualData: By category, you can find computer vision data; it allows for searchable queries.
- CMU Libraries: At CMU, Huajin Wang has amassed a treasure trove of data for you.
- The Big Bad NLP Database: This is a great collection of datasets for natural language processing, compiled and curated by Quantum Stat.
Data augmentation
When data is limited, data augmentation can assist you in increasing your dataset by employing automated changes to the data. An image of a cat rotated is still an image of a cat, for example. You may also add an additional layer of complexity by changing the provided label. For example, if we receive a movie review labeled as “positive” and then negate the review text, we expect the new label to be “negative.”
Data cleaning
Datasets frequently have missing values or incorrect data types or ranges. Consider how a spreadsheet change might harm your dataset if you’ve ever had to deal with it. Furthermore, getting rid of redundant elements may save you a lot of time. Data cleaning might be time-consuming, but if done correctly and automatically, it can significantly improve the quality of your data and, therefore, your model with very little work.
So, how do you start your data cleaning process? These are 4 steps to help kickstart your data cleaning project.
Data management
A database is altered or updated regularly. When a new data source becomes available, it might be time to add new columns or tables. The final format of the data may often be brought about via ETL procedures. When it comes to generating high-quality models, good management and maintenance of the data are required.
Do you know AI will soon oversee its own data management?
Model development
The machine learning lifecycle begins with data preparation and culminates with model development. The data scientist and the ML engineer are the key players in this phase.
Shortly:
- Use existing pre-trained models to expand.
- Create a training loop.
- Experiment tracking
Selecting an architecture
Select a baseline architecture first. This should be a straightforward model with good outcomes that require little effort to maintain. When comparing this model to the more sophisticated models that will be trained later, you may wish to start with vanilla classical ML solutions (e.g. logistic regression, xgboost).
Finally, you might want to play around with more advanced DL algorithms, ensembles, complex feature engineering, and feature selection later. These techniques will need more testing to determine what is most suitable for the issue you attempt to solve. It may be difficult to train these since they require a lot of practice; therefore, it is smart to limit the space to explore by beginning with well-established parameters.
Training
Data scientists will explore new architecture and feature engineering in this phase. These models are trained on the training set, hoping they will learn the required function and generalize to new facts. The training procedure might require a large engineering operation (as seen in GPT-3). After that, hyperparameter tuning and error analysis may be used to modify model architecture or introduce new features as needed.
The number of learning models and hyperparameters that can be used in these studies is enormous, making it critical to keep track of and manage all trained models and their performance to allow for the easy reconstruction (MLflow is an excellent example).
Evaluation
The best model is the one that solves the problem effectively and efficiently, with a good combination of accuracy, precision, or F1 score, for example. The evaluation process looks at metrics like accuracy, precision, or F1 score to determine which model is appropriate for addressing the problem—in-depth study and comprehension of when models fail and why they are required during proper evaluation.
Metrics for evaluating models should help you compare them to each other and determine whether you’ve discovered a solution that meets your company’s objectives. You may find that none of the models is adequate for your use case; in this case, you can experiment further, extend the data collection, or move on to another activity.
Deploy and integrate model
Once you’ve completed training the model, the data scientist can then hand it over to the MLOps engineer so that it may be deployed to production. The product developer will then incorporate the model into the product.
The process of shifting the model to production presents different difficulties. The following are some of the most significant concerns that must be addressed:
- What kind of resources will the model need in a live setting? Do you require load balancing? What GPU capacity do you need?
- How do you keep an existing model running as intended? Has there been any significant data drift or idea change that might suggest your model is no longer fit for purpose?
- What are the steps for monitoring your machine learning lifecycle model performance in real time, alignment with KPIs and regulations, and whether something is wrong with the data pipeline?
- How can you use the model’s performance in production to provide insights and assist with future retraining when the time comes?
Online prediction
We can deploy the model to an online web service and make API calls to the online service to obtain online prediction predictions. This is beneficial when we need real-time predictions, such as a real-time product ranking.
Offline batch prediction
For other models, we don’t always need real-time predictions. We may employ an offline batch prediction task to obtain predictions for many data points. After the model has run for some time, it may write down and save its recommendations in a database. Developers or end users can then retrieve these predictions. We may forecast demand for goods daily over the next year with an offline batch prediction job, as an example, for the demand forecast model.
Experimentation
You may experiment to test the model’s effectiveness when real production traffic is used if you create a ranking algorithm for your e-commerce site. You can divide the website traffic into two parts. Half of the people will view the items in the original order (control group). Another half of the participants will see goods listed in a ranking order based on the ranking model (treatment group). We may compare the control group’s target metrics (such as click-through rate) to those in the treatment group.
Monitor the model
Congratulations! Your model is now live after the team’s hard work! You ran an experiment on the model and obtained the expected result. Is this all there is to it? The answer is no. Model performance may deteriorate with time. It’s critical to have a good monitoring system to ensure that the model functions properly in production over time.
Production problems are not uncommon. One of the most prevalent difficulties is data drift, which implies that the target variable’s distribution or input data changes over time. The model-monitoring system should track model performance with real-world data, identify a problem with data drift, and provide feedback for improved model development (e.g., retraining). Do you want to deep dive into challenges in the machine learning lifecycle?
What are the challenges of machine learning lifecycle management?
These are the most common challenges in machine learning lifecycle management:
- Manual labor: Manual data processing is required for each application. It implies that data scientists must manually acquire, analyze, and process data for each program. They must evaluate their old models to create new ones and manually fine-tune them regularly. Model monitoring consumes a significant amount of time to minimize performance loss.
- Disconnection between teams: Data scientists can create effective machine learning models independently. However, according to a study by Algorithmia, 55% of organizations currently using ML methods have yet to move a model into production. Data scientists must collaborate with business experts, designers, software engineers, and other teams to deploy a machine learning model for a business use case. The procedure is more time-consuming as a result of this collaboration.
- Scalability: When data sizes or the number of deployed machine learning models grows, manual administration becomes difficult. It may be necessary to create, manage, and monitor each model by several teams of data scientists. As a result, there is a limit to how big an organization’s machine learning apps can grow while still using manual methods.
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What are the best practices for machine learning lifecycle management?
These practices can help you get the most out of your machine learning project.
Automation of the machine learning lifecycle
Automation is required to enable the continuous scaling of machine learning models. Resource-consuming activities like feature engineering, model training, monitoring, and retraining are all accelerated by automation. It frees up time so you can play with new models more quickly.
Standardization of the process
For data scientists to work together with various teams, a shared lingua franca must exist between them. Standardization of the ML development and administration infrastructure within an organization allows for quick communication between departments.
Continuous training
The data in your environment isn’t static. As a result, your ML model must be retrained regularly to maintain model effectiveness.
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Conclusion
The machine learning lifecycle is a lengthy process requiring the combined knowledge of many positions.
- The problem is defined by the product team.
- The data is collected by the product developer.
- Preparing the data and teaching the model are the responsibilities of a data scientist.
- The model is deployed in production by the MLOps engineer.
- The product developer incorporates the model into the finished product.
- The model monitoring system is set up by the MLOps engineer.
It’s possible that learning more about machine learning engineering can help you.
Only a tiny percentage of all organizations attempt to integrate machine learning (ML) into their business management to put a model into production. Because the machine learning lifecycle is not straightforward, it must be adjusted regularly by incorporating new data and annotation improvements and model and training pipeline development. The first iteration might result in a production-ready model if you know what you’re getting into, but it will also need to be maintained and updated over time. Fortunately, there are numerous tools available to assist with every process stage.
We’d love to learn about your machine learning journey! Please provide details about the tools you’re using for each stage of the process, and let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.
