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 initialization

Let's open a new notebook and install a specific version of feast and the Pygments library to get a more nicely formatted view when we look at the files. The following code installs the required libraries:

!pip install feast==0.18.1
!pip install Pygments

Let's initialize the Feast project and look through the folder structure and files. The following code block initializes a Feast project called demo:

!feast init demo

The preceding code will output the following lines:

Feast is an open source project that collects anonymized error reporting and usage statistics. To opt out or learn more see https://docs.feast.dev/reference/usage
Creating a new Feast repository in /content/demo.

Let's ignore the warning message in the first line. In the second line, you can see where the Feast repo is initialized. If you are using Google Colab you will see a similar path, /content/<repo_name>; if not, the...