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

Chapter 3: Feature Store Fundamentals, Terminology, and Usage

In the last chapter, we discussed the need to bring features into production and different ways of doing so, along with a look at common issues with these approaches and how feature stores can solve them. We have built up a lot of expectations about feature stores, and it's time to understand how they work. As mentioned in the last chapter, a feature store is different from a traditional database – it is a data storage service for managing machine learning features, a hybrid system that can be used for storage and retrieval of historical features for model training. It can also serve the latest features at low latency for real-time prediction, and at sub-second latency for batch prediction.

In this chapter, we will discuss what a feature store is, how it works, and the range of terminology used in the feature store world. For this chapter, we will use one of the most widely used open source feature stores...