Seven Checks to take your Machine Learning Models to Production

March 22, 2022

Machine-learning models nearly always need to be deployed to a production environment to give business value. Unfortunately, many models never make it to production, and even if they do, the deployment process takes far longer than it should. Even models that have been successfully deployed will require domain-specific maintenance, which can pose new engineering and operational issues.

The fact is that machine learning models are software. Any software deployment and maintenance effort is difficult, but machine learning adds to the complexity. MLOps is a field that arose as a result of these demands. A comprehensive MLOps implementation streamlines generating and deploying ML models in the same manner that DevOps has provided structure to the software engineering process. It implies that we must keep an eye on our models.

  1. Collect Information

Given the problem you wish to tackle, you'll need to conduct research and gather data to feed your machine. The quality and quantity of information you obtain are critical since they will directly impact how well or poorly your model performs. You might have the data in an existing database, or you'll have to start from scratch. If the project is small, you can construct a spreadsheet to export as a CSV file later. Web scraping is also commonly used to automatically collect data from multiple sources, such as APIs.

  1. Data Quality

Data is the most important thing in today's world. It can be sparse and incomplete at times, or noisy and erratic at others. It is required to invest in data pre-processing and product building to improve it. You can acquire the data from the data collecting module and apply suitable modifications in the alteration of components if it's correctly handled. This part serves a dual purpose. It prepares the training data before applying the same modifications to additional data samples that enter your system. It basically extracts features from the raw inputs and produces them.

  1. Sanity Checks

Tests serve as a crucial barrier between you and the system's faults. Perform sanity tests on your machine learning model before releasing it to ensure the best experience on the product. Develop your model and then test it on the test dataset and other aspects. Make sure the parameters you picked for your model are delivering desired outputs. Standard measurements like model correctness can also be used to accomplish this. 

The decrease of model quality is the final measure of both drifts. However, there are situations when the real quantities are unknown, and we are unable to calculate them immediately. There are leading indicators to monitor in this scenario. If the qualities of the input data or the target function have changed, we can keep track of it.

  1. Reliability

Traditional software is simpler to evaluate, but machine learning models are computationally more expensive. It's crucial that your machine learning applications perform as intended and are resistant to failures. Getting machine learning reliability right involves some unique security and testing challenges.

  1. Model Testing

Make sure whether the machine learning model performs accurately in the real world as per the requirement. Build a framework for which the future versions can be evaluated. To enhance overall performance, repeat on various segments of the model regularly. All of this may result in new constraints for delivering the model to the systems.

In addition, not only the model quality but also a business KPI must be measured. The decrease in ROC AUC, for example, does not clearly reflect how much it reduces marketing conversions. It's crucial to link model quality to the business indication or find interpretable proxies.

  1. Segment-wise Accuracy

Some specific categories to monitor, such as model accuracy for premium clients versus the general public, may already be on your radar. It would demand a one-of-a-kind quality metric derived exclusively for the objects in the section you specify.

In some cases, it may make sense to look for underperforming areas ahead of time. Consider the situation in which your real estate pricing model consistently produces higher-than-true quotations in a specific area. That's something you should keep in mind! We can add post-processing or business logic to the model output depending on the situation.

  1. Quality of Service

The machine learning service will remain a service indefinitely. You will almost definitely employ a well-established method of software system observation that your company has in place. The model must have correct, alerting, and accountable individuals on call if it is to run beyond time.

Even if you only manage batch models, you can create associate degree exceptions! Simple health indicators like memory utilisation and CPU load, for example, must nevertheless be compelled to be monitored.

While there is some margin for mistake when integrating models into production environments, these errors are very likely to fail. We've seen some fundamental checks for ML models in production, which should help you begin navigating this water and reclaiming control of your models before it's too late.

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Reference Links

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362323995_GAUDI_A_Neural_Architect_for_Immersive_3D_Scene_Generation

https://www.technology.org/2022/07/31/gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation/ 

https://www.patentlyapple.com/2022/08/apple-has-unveiled-gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation.html

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