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

Feast terminology and definitions

New discoveries in software applications often give birth to new terms or redefine some existing terms in the context of the new software. For example, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) in general means a type of graph; whereas in the context of Airflow (assuming you're familiar with it), it means defining a collection of tasks and their dependencies. Similarly, Feast and the wider feature store context have a set of terms that are used frequently. Let's learn what they are in this section.

Entity: An entity is a collection of semantically related features. Entities are domain objects to which the features can be mapped. In a ride-hailing service, customer and driver could be the entities, and features can then be grouped with their corresponding entities.

The following code block is an example of entity definition:

driver = Entity(name='driver', value_type=ValueType.STRING,
        ...