MLOps Breakdown

A step-by-step breakdown of the MLOps pipeline along with best practices and tools.

1. Ingest Data

Description: Collect raw data from various sources like databases, APIs, logs, IoT devices, etc.

Best Practices: Ensure structured data collection, automate ingestion pipelines.

Tools: Apache Kafka, Apache Nifi, Airflow, AWS Glue, Google Cloud Dataflow

2. Validate Data

Description: Check data quality, integrity, and consistency.

Best Practices: Use schema validation, automate data validation pipelines.

Tools: Great Expectations, Deequ, TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV)

3. Clean Data

Description: Handle missing values, remove duplicates, resolve inconsistencies.

Best Practices: Define clear rules, automate cleaning processes.

Tools: Pandas, PySpark, OpenRefine

4. Standardize Data

Description: Convert data into a uniform format for easier processing.

Best Practices: Normalize numerical values, standardize categorical data.

Tools: Scikit-learn, Pandas, NumPy

5. Curate Data

Description: Organize and prepare data for feature engineering.

Best Practices: Maintain metadata, align curated datasets with business objectives.

Tools: Delta Lake, DVC, Snowflake

6. Extract Features

Description: Identify and derive useful features from raw data.

Best Practices: Use feature extraction techniques like PCA, embeddings.

Tools: Featuretools, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow Feature Columns

7. Select Features

Description: Choose the most relevant features for modeling.

Best Practices: Use selection techniques like mutual information, SHAP values.

Tools: Scikit-learn, SHAP, BorutaPy

8. Identify Candidate Models

Description: Experiment with different ML models.

Best Practices: Start with baseline models before tuning complex ones.

Tools: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, H2O.ai, Google AutoML

9. Write Code

Description: Implement ML models, pipelines, and training logic.

Best Practices: Follow modular programming, use version control.

Tools: Git, Jupyter Notebooks, VS Code, PyCharm

10. Train Models

Description: Fit models using the prepared dataset.

Best Practices: Use GPU/TPU acceleration, implement early stopping.

Tools: TensorFlow, PyTorch, XGBoost

11. Validate & Evaluate Models

Description: Assess model performance on validation data.

Best Practices: Use cross-validation, compare models with benchmarks.

Tools: Scikit-learn, TensorBoard, MLflow

12. Deploy & Monitor Model

Description: Release model into production and track performance.

Best Practices: Use A/B testing, automate monitoring alerts.

Tools: AWS SageMaker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana

13. Retrain or Retire Model

Description: Update or remove models based on performance.

Best Practices: Automate scheduled retraining with fresh data.

Tools: Kubeflow, Airflow, DVC