Book Image

Feature Store for Machine Learning

By : Jayanth Kumar M J
Book Image

Feature Store for Machine Learning

By: Jayanth Kumar M J

Overview of this book

Feature store is one of the storage layers in machine learning (ML) operations, where data scientists and ML engineers can store transformed and curated features for ML models. This makes them available for model training, inference (batch and online), and reuse in other ML pipelines. Knowing how to utilize feature stores to their fullest potential can save you a lot of time and effort, and this book will teach you everything you need to know to get started. Feature Store for Machine Learning is for data scientists who want to learn how to use feature stores to share and reuse each other's work and expertise. You’ll be able to implement practices that help in eliminating reprocessing of data, providing model-reproducible capabilities, and reducing duplication of work, thus improving the time to production of the ML model. While this ML book offers some theoretical groundwork for developers who are just getting to grips with feature stores, there's plenty of practical know-how for those ready to put their knowledge to work. With a hands-on approach to implementation and associated methodologies, you'll get up and running in no time. By the end of this book, you’ll have understood why feature stores are essential and how to use them in your ML projects, both on your local system and on the cloud.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Why Do We Need a Feature Store?
4
Section 2 – A Feature Store in Action
9
Section 3 – Alternatives, Best Practices, and a Use Case

Introduction to the problem and the dataset

In this exercise, we will use the telecom customer churn dataset, which is available on Kaggle at the URL https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/blastchar/telco-customer-churn. The aim of the exercise is to use this dataset, prepare the data for model training, and train an XGBoost model to predict customer churn. The dataset has 21 columns and the column names are self-explanatory. The following is a preview of the dataset:

Figure 8.1 – Telecom dataset

Figure 8.1 shows the labeled telecom customer churn dataset. The customerID column is the ID of the customers. All other columns except Churn represent the set of attributes, and the Churn column is the target column.

Let's get our hands dirty and perform feature engineering next.