I’ve been working on this for a little while now, but I finally decided to flip over the Catallaxy Services website to its new design today.
The old design was something I came up with about seven years ago and it definitely showed its age. In particular, it had a crummy mobile experience, with different font sizes, needing to pinch-scroll to see anything, and other dodgy bits.
I like the new website a lot better. Granted, if I didn’t like it as much, I wouldn’t have made the switch, but there are a few things I want to point out.
Resources
I do a lot of stuff, and it’s nice to be able to sort out most of those things in one location. That’s the Resources section.
Some of the things I do.
I also broke out resources by section, so if you want an overview of my community resources, you can click the button to show just those resources. Or if you want to give me money in exchange for goods and/or services, I have a “Paid Resources” section too.
Mobile-First Experience
I wanted to make sure not only that the site would work on a phone, but that it looked good on a phone. When I present, this will often be the first way people check out my site, so I want it to be a good experience.
Images
I’m still working on this, but one of the things about the old site which made it fast but boring is that it was entirely textual. There were no images. Now, there are images on pretty much every page. I want to see what I can do to improve things a bit more, but it’s a start.
Presentations Page
Like the Resources section, you can see a list of presentations and also filter by topic.
These machines, they never learn.
For each presentation, I have the same contents that I had before: abstract, slides, demo code, additional media, and links/resources. I’ve shuffled things around a bit so that it looks reasonably good on a wide-screen monitor but also works on a phone or tablet. Here’s a presentation where everything’s nice and filled out. For other talks, where not everything is filled out, I at least have sensible defaults.
Services
Something I didn’t do a great job of calling out before was availability for consulting and paid services. With the new site, I emphasize this in a few ways, whether that’s consulting, paid training (though actual paid training is forthcoming), or books + third-party offerings like PolyBase Revealed.
What’s Next
I have a few more things around the site, namely around custom training, which I intend to work on during the winter. I also have a couple of smaller ideas which I plan to implement over the next several days, but won’t call them out specifically. For now, though, I think this is a pretty good start.
The course covers category theory, a rather abstract branch of mathematics. Throughout the twenty videos, Milewski takes us through the landscape of category theory, grounding it as much as possible in the language and concepts of programming. Some of Milewski’s examples are in Haskell but you don’t need to know that language to understand what’s going on. Similarly, other examples are in C++, but it’s clear from the context what he means even if you’ve never seen a line of the language.
I came into this course with a fair knowledge of functional programming and a less-than-fair knowledge of category theory. Watching these videos has given me a much better understanding of the topic and has really cleared up some of the trickier concepts in functional programming like monads.
If you are interested in the series, don’t get too distracted by the intentionally-opaque examples. I’ve seen this in undergraduate courses I took on logic, where the professor wants to ensure that you don’t get stuck thinking about a specific example when explaining a general concept, as though the specific example were the only case. Milewski does a good job of combining the highly-general drawings of categories and how elements in categories can map to other categories via functors but then brings it down to examples we’re more familiar using, particularly with sets. There’s a balancing act involved in these examples and I think Milewski has that act pretty well covered.
It may take you a month or three to get through all of these videos, but I definitely recommend them. From here, I’m going to work through the book and fill in more gaps.
This isn’t a pure DBA talk—in fact, it’s more useful for developers than DBAs. But if you’re in a database development or hybrid DBA role, and you’re sick of needing to be awake for 3 AM database deployments, this talk is for you.
So far in this series, we’ve looked at training a model at runtime. Even in the prior post, where we looked at predictions, we first had to train a model. With a Naive Bayes model against a small data set, that’s not an onerous task—it’s maybe a second or two the first time we instantiate our objects and we can leave the prediction engine around for the lifetime of our application, so we are able to amortize the cost fairly effectively.
Suppose, however, that we have a mighty oak of a neural network which we have trained over the past two months. It finally completed training and we now have a set of weights. Obviously, we don’t want to retrain this if we can avoid it, so we need to find a way to serialize our model and save it to disk somewhere so that we can re-use it later.
Saving a Model to Disk
Saving a model to disk is quite easy. Here’s the method I created to do just that:
public void SaveModel(MLContext mlContext, ITransformer model, string modelPath)
{
using (var stream = File.Create(modelPath))
{
mlContext.Model.Save(model, null, stream);
}
}
We create a file stream and use the built-in Save() method to write our data to that stream. Here is an example of me calling that method:
This generates a binary .mdl file which contains enough information to reconstitute our model and generate predictions off of it.
Loading a Model from Disk
Here’s where things get annoying again. If you have any kind of custom mapping, you need to do a bit of extra work, as I mentioned in my rant.
Next, when it comes time to deserialize the model, we need to register assemblies. I have two custom mappings but they’re both in the same assembly. Therefore, I only need to register the assembly using one of them. Should I desire to migrate these mappings into separate assemblies later, I would need to update the code to include each assembly at least once. I’m not sure yet which is a better practice: include all custom assemblies regardless of whether you need them, or go back and modify calling code later. What I do know is that it’s a bit annoying when all I really wanted was a simple string or integer translation. Anyhow, here’s the code:
Once I’ve registered those assemblies, I can reconstitute the model using a method call:
var newModel = bmt.LoadModel(mlContext, modelPath);
That method call wraps the following code:
public ITransformer LoadModel(MLContext mlContext, string modelPath)
{
ITransformer loadedModel;
using (var stream = File.OpenRead(modelPath))
{
DataViewSchema dvs;
loadedModel = mlContext.Model.Load(stream, out dvs);
}
return loadedModel;
}
What we’re doing is building a model (of interface type ITransformer) as well as a DataViewSchema which I don’t need here. I get back my completed model and can use it like I just finished training. In fact, I have a test case in my GitHub repo which compares a freshly-trained model versus a saved and reloaded model to ensure function calls work and the outputs are the same:
private string GenerateOutcome(PredictionEngineBase<RawInput, Prediction> pe)
{
return pe.Predict(new RawInput
{
Game = 0,
Quarterback = "Josh Allen",
Location = "Home",
NumberOfPointsScored = 17,
TopReceiver = "Robert Foster",
TopRunner = "Josh Allen",
NumberOfSacks = 0,
NumberOfDefensiveTurnovers = 0,
MinutesPossession = 0,
Outcome = "WHO KNOWS?"
}).Outcome;
}
[Test()]
public void SaveAndLoadModel()
{
string modelPath = "C:\\Temp\\BillsModel.mdl";
bmt.SaveModel(mlContext, model, modelPath);
// Register the assembly that contains 'QBCustomMappings' with the ComponentCatalog
// so it can be found when loading the model.
mlContext.ComponentCatalog.RegisterAssembly(typeof(QBCustomMappings).Assembly);
mlContext.ComponentCatalog.RegisterAssembly(typeof(PointsCustomMappings).Assembly);
var newModel = bmt.LoadModel(mlContext, modelPath);
var newPredictor = mlContext.Model.CreatePredictionEngine<RawInput, Prediction>(newModel);
var po = GenerateOutcome(predictor);
var npo = GenerateOutcome(newPredictor);
Assert.IsNotNull(newModel);
Assert.AreEqual(po, npo);
}
Results, naturally, align.
Conclusion
In today’s post, we looked at the ability to serialize and deserialize models. We looked at saving the model to disk, although we could save to some other location, as the Save() method on MLContext requires merely a Stream and not a FileStream. Saving and loading models is straightforward as long as you’ve done all of the pre-requisite work around custom mappings (or avoided them altogether).
Thanks to some travels, part 4 in the series is a bit later than I originally anticipated. In the prior two posts, we looked at different ways to create, train, and test models. In this post, we’ll use a trained model and generate predictions from it. We’ll go back to the model from part two.
Predictions in a Jar
Our first step will be to create a test project. This way, we can try out our code without the commitment of a real project. Inside that test project, I’m going to include NUnit bits and prep a setup method. I think I also decided to figure out how many functional programming patterns I could violate in a single file, but that was an ancillary goal. Here is the code file; we’ll work through it block by block.
Setting Things Up
First, we have our setup block.
public class Tests
{
MLContext mlContext;
BillsModelTrainer bmt;
IEstimator<ITransformer> trainer;
ITransformer model;
PredictionEngineBase<RawInput, Prediction> predictor;
[SetUp]
public void Setup()
{
mlContext = new MLContext(seed: 9997);
bmt = new BillsModelTrainer();
var data = bmt.GetRawData(mlContext, "Resources\\2018Bills.csv");
var split = mlContext.Data.TrainTestSplit(data, testFraction: 0.25);
trainer = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Trainers.NaiveBayes(labelColumnName: "Label", featureColumnName: "Features");
model = bmt.TrainModel(mlContext, split.TrainSet, trainer);
predictor = mlContext.Model.CreatePredictionEngine<RawInput, Prediction>(model);
}
In here, I have mutable objects for context, the Bills model trainer class, the output trainer, the ouptut model, and a prediction engine which takes data of type RawInput and generates predictions of type Prediction. This means that any data we feed into the model must have the same shape as our raw data.
The Setup() method will run before each batch of tests. In it, we build a new ML context with a pre-generated seed of 9997. That way, every time I run this I’ll get the same outcomes. We also new up our Bills model trainer and grab raw data from the Resources folder. I’m going to use the same 2018 game data that we looked at in part 2 of the series, as that’s all of the data I have. We’ll pull out 25% of the games for testing and retain the other 75% for training. For the purposes of this demo, I’m using the Naive Bayes classifier for my trainer, and so TrainModel() takes but a short time, returning me a model.
To use this model for prediction generation, I call mlContext.Model.CreatePredictionEngine with the model as my parameter and explain that I’ll give the model an object of type RawInput and expect back an object of type Prediction. The Prediction class is trivial:
public class Prediction
{
[ColumnName("PredictedOutcome")]
public string Outcome { get; set; }
}
I would have preferred the option to get back a simple string but it has to be a custom class.
Knocking Things Down
Generating predictions is easy once you have the data you need. Here’s the test function, along with five separate test cases:
What I’m doing here is taking in a set of parameters that I’d expect my users could input: quarterback name, home/away game, number of points scored, leading receiver, and leading scorer. I also need to pass in my expected test result—that’s not something I’d expect a user to give me, but is important for test cases to make sure that my model is still scoring things appropriately.
The Predict() method on my predictor takes in a RawInput object, so I can generate that from my input data. Recall that we ignore some of those raw inputs, including game, number of sacks, number of defensive turnovers, and minutes of possession. Instead of bothering my users with that data, I just pass in defaults because I know we don’t use them. In a production-like scenario, I’m more and more convinced that I’d probably do all of this cleanup before model training, especially when dealing with wide data sets with dozens or maybe hundreds of inputs.
Note as well that I need to pass in the outcome. That outcome doesn’t have to be our best guess or anything reasonable—it just needs to have the same data type as our original input data set.
What we get back is a series of hopefully-positive test results:
Even in this model, Kelvin Benjamin drops the ball.
Predictions are that easy: a simple method call and you get back an outcome of type Prediction which has a single string property called Outcome.
Trying Out Different Algorithms
We can also use this test project to try out different algorithms and see what performs better given our data. To do that, I’ll build an evaluation tester. The entire method looks like this:
[TestCase(new object[] { "Naive Bayes" })]
[TestCase(new object[] { "L-BFGS" })]
[TestCase(new object[] { "SDCA Non-Calibrated" })]
public void BasicEvaluationTest(string trainerToUse)
{
mlContext = new MLContext(seed: 9997);
bmt = new BillsModelTrainer();
var data = bmt.GetRawData(mlContext, "Resources\\2018Bills.csv");
var split = mlContext.Data.TrainTestSplit(data, testFraction: 0.4);
// If we wish to review the split data, we can run these.
var trainSet = mlContext.Data.CreateEnumerable<RawInput>(split.TrainSet, reuseRowObject: false);
var testSet = mlContext.Data.CreateEnumerable<RawInput>(split.TestSet, reuseRowObject: false);
IEstimator<ITransformer> newTrainer;
switch (trainerToUse)
{
case "Naive Bayes":
newTrainer = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Trainers.NaiveBayes(labelColumnName: "Label", featureColumnName: "Features");
break;
case "L-BFGS":
newTrainer = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Trainers.LbfgsMaximumEntropy(labelColumnName: "Label", featureColumnName: "Features");
break;
case "SDCA Non-Calibrated":
newTrainer = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Trainers.SdcaNonCalibrated(labelColumnName: "Label", featureColumnName: "Features");
break;
default:
newTrainer = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Trainers.NaiveBayes(labelColumnName: "Label", featureColumnName: "Features");
break;
}
var newModel = bmt.TrainModel(mlContext, split.TrainSet, newTrainer);
var metrics = mlContext.MulticlassClassification.Evaluate(newModel.Transform(split.TestSet));
Console.WriteLine($"Macro Accuracy = {metrics.MacroAccuracy}; Micro Accuracy = {metrics.MicroAccuracy}");
Console.WriteLine($"Confusion Matrix with {metrics.ConfusionMatrix.NumberOfClasses} classes.");
Console.WriteLine($"{metrics.ConfusionMatrix.GetFormattedConfusionTable()}");
Assert.AreNotEqual(0, metrics.MacroAccuracy);
}
Basically, we’re building up the same set of operations that we did in the Setup() method, but because that setup method has mutable objects, I don’t want to run the risk of overwriting the “real” model with one of these tests, so we do everything locally.
The easiest way I could think of to handle multiple trainers in my test case was to put in a switch statement over my set of valid algorithms. That makes the method brittle with respect to future changes (where every new algorithm I’d like to test involves modifying the test method itself) but it works for our purposes here. After choosing the trainer, we walk through the same modeling process and then spit out a few measures: macro and micro accuracy, as well as a confusion matrix.
Micro accuracy sums up all of your successes and failures, whether the outcome is win, lose, draw, suspension due to blizzard, or cancellation on account of alien abduction. We add up all of those cases and if we’re right 95 out of 100 times, our micro accuracy is 95%.
Macro accuracy calculates the harmonic mean of all of the individual classes. If our accuracies for different outcomes are: [ 85% (win), 80% (loss), 50% (draw), 99% (suspension due to blizzard), 33% (cancellation on account of alien abduction) ], we sum them up and divide by the number of outcomes: (0.85 + 0.8 + 0.5 + 0.99 + 0.33) / 5 = 69.4%.
Both of these measures are useful but macro accuracy has a tendency to get pulled down when a small category is wrong. Let’s say that there are 3 alien abduction scenarios out of 100,000 games and we got 1 of those 3 correct. Unless we were trying to predict for alien abductions, the outcome is uncommon enough that it’s relatively unimportant that we get it right. Our macro accuracy is 69.4% but if we drop that class, we’re up to 78.5%. For this reason, micro accuracy is typically better for heavily imbalanced classes.
Finally, we print out a confusion matrix, which shows us what each model did in terms of predicted category versus actual outcome.
Conclusion
Generating predictions with ML.NET is pretty easy, definitely one of the smoothest experiences when working with this product. Although we looked at a test in the blog post, applying this to real code is simple as well as you can see in my MVC project demo code (particularly the controller). In this case, I made the conscious decision to train anew at application start because training is fast. In a real project, we’d want to save a model to disk and load it, which is what we’ll cover next time.
SQL Server has a robust set of tools to prepare, aggregate, and query time series data. This course will show you how to build and work with dates, parse dates from strings (and deal with invalid strings), and format dates for reporting. From there, you will see how SQL Server’s built-in aggregation operators and window functions can solve important business problems like calculating running totals, finding moving averages, and displaying month-over-month differences using realistic sample data sets. You will also see how taking a different perspective on your data can solve difficult problems.
Chapter 1 is available for free, so you can check it out at no risk of accidentally giving me money. This chapter also includes one of the biggest tricks behind working with time series data in SQL Server: calendar tables. And add in a bonus bit on the APPLY operator. The other three chapters are great too, but those are for closers subscribers.
Last time on 36 Chambers, we looked at building our own model to explain why Kelvin Benjamin is awful. Today, we’re going to use the ML.NET Model Builder to understand how awful airlines are. The unofficial motto of this blog, after all, is “Parades need rain, too.”
The ML.NET Model Builder is still in preview, so expect things to change; some of those changes might be breaking changes, too. If you want to play along, download the Model Builder from the Visual Studio Marketplace. This works for Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019, so you’ll need one of those. Community Edition is supported as well, so you don’t need a fancy version of Visual Studio.
After you install the extension, you’ll need to be in a solution with at least one project in it. The Model Builder creates new projects but is a context menu option off of a project itself. If you want to play along at home, clone my GitHub repo. I also have some instructions on the repo, which is rare for me.
First up, right-click on any of the projects and select Add --> Machine Learning.
We’ll add machine learning, all right, just not here. Not Europa.
This brings up a wizard tab to build a machine learning model.
Choose the form of the destructor.
You have four options from which to choose: two-class classification, multi-class classification, regression, or Choose Your Own Adventure. Today, we’re going to create a two-class classification model. Incidentally, they’re not kidding about things changing in preview—last time I looked at this, they didn’t have multi-class classifiers available.
Once you select Sentiment Analysis (that is, two-class classification of text), you can figure out how to feed data to this trainer.
Twitter is a garbage hole and airlines are great garbage magnets, so this should be grand.
As of right now, we can use delimited files or read from a table in SQL Server. Note the 1 GB limit for maximum file size; this is not a solution for very large data sets.
Once we select a file, we get the option to predict a label. As of the time of writing, this label must have a value of either 1 or 0. Our tweets are in the text column, so we’ll use that to predict sentiment.
From there, we move on to training.
This model is definitely a 10.
We don’t specify the algorithm or algorithms to use, but we do specify the number of seconds allowed for training. This is an interesting specification parameter; basically, the more seconds you allow for training, the more likely you are to find a good model. I don’t have any insight into the specifics of what happens during this training period; my expectation is that they iterate through a set of algorithms and try progressively more complicated sets of inputs and transformations. The ML.NET team does have a set of guidelines around how long you might want to train given data sizes. I’m going to train for 4 minutes because I didn’t plan well enough ahead to give myself ten minutes to let it wait. Here it is in progress:
Hard at work on training, boss. Training all kinds of stuff here.
Eventually, we run out of time and we have a winner:
Like a proper horse race, this one changed just as we ran out of time. The most exciting 4 minutes in sports.
Now it is time to evaluate. We get to see a table with the five best models on a few criteria: accuracy, Area Under the Curve (AUC), Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC), F1 score, and the amount of time it took to train.
One of these things is not like the others.
One thing I wish I could see here was a breakdown of our key correlation matrix measures—AUC, AUPRC, and F1 score are fine combination metrics and are very useful, but when you have major discrepancies in class makeup, recall by itself can mean a lot. For example, suppose we have a test for a medical condition which affects 1 in 100,000 people. We can get a 99.999% accuracy if we simply return “Negative result” for everybody, but that’s an awful test because the recall is zero: we never catch any of the positive results. It could be that I am not clever enough to interpret these results and infer the base values, though.
Regardless, our next step is to generate some code. Click on the “Code” link and you get the opportunity to add new projects. Note that you do not get to choose which of the models you want to use; the Model Builder picks the one with the highest accuracy.
Time to make the donuts.
We now have two new projects.
I made the donuts.
We have a model project and a console application. The model project contains our trained model (as a zip file) and input and output files. Here is the input file:
using Microsoft.ML.Data;
namespace DotNetMachineLearningML.Model.DataModels
{
public class ModelInput
{
[ColumnName("airline_sentiment"), LoadColumn(0)]
public bool Airline_sentiment { get; set; }
[ColumnName("text"), LoadColumn(1)]
public string Text { get; set; }
}
}
And here is the output file:
using System;
using Microsoft.ML.Data;
namespace DotNetMachineLearningML.Model.DataModels
{
public class ModelOutput
{
// ColumnName attribute is used to change the column name from
// its default value, which is the name of the field.
[ColumnName("PredictedLabel")]
public bool Prediction { get; set; }
public float Score { get; set; }
}
}
The console application contains a model builder and a Program file. The ModelBuilder C# file allows us to modify or re-train our model should we desire, but is not needed for regular operation. The console application grabs a row at random from our tweet set and shows the prediction versus actual values. Instead of doing that, I’m going to take user input to classify a tweet. Replace the main method with this code:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
MLContext mlContext = new MLContext();
ITransformer mlModel = mlContext.Model.Load(GetAbsolutePath(MODEL_FILEPATH), out DataViewSchema inputSchema);
var predEngine = mlContext.Model.CreatePredictionEngine<ModelInput, ModelOutput>(mlModel);
Console.WriteLine("Enter a sample tweet:");
var text = Console.ReadLine();
// Create sample data to do a single prediction with it
ModelInput sampleData = new ModelInput { Text = text };
// Try a single prediction
ModelOutput predictionResult = predEngine.Predict(sampleData);
string outcome = predictionResult.Prediction ? "Positive tweet" : "Negative tweet";
Console.WriteLine($"Single Prediction --> Predicted value: {outcome}");
Console.WriteLine("=============== End of process, hit any key to finish ===============");
Console.ReadKey();
}
Change the console application to be the startup project and away we go:
Too soon for TWA jokes?
Conclusion
The Model Builder won’t replace an actual machine learning pipeline anytime soon, but it’s a good way to get started with processing clean data when you have no clue which algorithms you should try.
