Abstract Modern machine learning (ML) systems commonly use stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to train ML models. However, SGD relies on random data order to converge, which usually requires a full data shuffle. For in-DB ML systems and deep learning systems with large datasets stored onblock-addressable secondary storagesuch as HDD and SSD, this full data shuffle leads to low I/O performance—the data shuffling time can be even longer than the training itself, due to massive random data accesses. To balance the convergence rate of SGD (which favors data randomness) and its I/O performance (which favors sequential access), previous work has proposed several data shuffling strategies. In this paper, we first perform an empirical study on existing data shuffling strategies, showing that these strategies suffer from either low performance or low convergence rate. To solve this problem, we propose a simple but noveltwo-leveldata shuffling strategy named , which canavoida full data shuffle while maintainingcomparableconvergence rate of SGD as if a full shuffle were performed. We further theoretically analyze the convergence behavior of and empirically evaluate its efficacy in both in-DB ML and deep learning systems. For in-DB ML systems, we integrate into PostgreSQL by introducing three newphysicaloperators with optimizations. For deep learning systems, we extend single-process to multi-process for the parallel/distributed environment and integrate it into PyTorch. Our evaluation shows that can achieve comparable convergence rate with the full-shuffle-based SGD for both linear models and deep learning models. For in-DB ML with linear models, is 1.6 $$\times $$ × $$-$$ - 12.8 $$\times $$ × faster than two state-of-the-art systems, Apache MADlib and Bismarck, on both HDD and SSD. For deep learning models on ImageNet, is 1.5 $$\times $$ × faster than PyTorch with full data shuffle.

In our experience of working with domain experts who are using today’s AutoML systems, a common problem we encountered is what we call "unrealistic expectations" – when users are facing a very challenging task with a noisy data acquisition process, while being expected to achieve startlingly high accuracy with machine learning (ML). Many of these are predestined to fail from the beginning. In traditional software engineering, this problem is addressed via a feasibility study, an indispensable step before developing any software system. In this paper, we present Snoopy, with the goal of supporting data scientists and machine learning engineers performing a systematic and theoretically founded feasibility study before building ML applications. We approach this problem by estimating the irreducible error of the underlying task, also known as the Bayes error rate (BER), which stems from data quality issues in datasets used to train or evaluate ML models. We design a practical Bayes error estimator that is compared against baseline feasibility study candidates on 6 datasets (with additional real and synthetic noise of different levels) in computer vision and natural language processing. Furthermore, by including our systematic feasibility study with additional signals into the iterative label cleaning process, we demonstrate in end-to-end experiments how users are able to save substantial labeling time and monetary efforts.

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the cornerstone of modern ML systems. Despite its computational efficiency, SGD requires random data access that is inherently inefficient when implemented in systems that rely on block-addressable secondary storage such as HDD and SSD, e.g., in-DB ML systems and TensorFlow/PyTorch over large files. To address this impedance mismatch, various data shuffling strategies have been proposed to balance the convergence rate of SGD (which favors randomness) and its I/O performance (which favors sequential access).

Transfer learning can be seen as a data- and compute-efficient alternative to training models from scratch. The emergence of rich model repositories, such as TensorFlow Hub, enables practitioners and researchers to unleash the potential of these models across a wide range of downstream tasks. As these repositories keep growing exponentially, efficiently selecting a good model for the task at hand becomes paramount. However, a single generic search strategy (e.g., taking the model with the highest linear classifier accuracy) does not lead to optimal model selection for diverse downstream tasks. In fact, using hybrid or mixed strategies can often be beneficial. Therefore, we propose SHiFT, the first downstream task-aware, flexible, and efficient model search engine for transfer learning. Users interface with SHiFT using the SHiFT-QL query language, which gives users the flexibility to customize their search criteria. We optimize SHiFT-QL queries using a cost-based decision maker and evaluate them on a wide rang of tasks. Motivated by the iterative nature of machine learning development, we further support efficient incremental executions of our queries, which requires a special implementation when jointly used with our optimizations.

Continuous integration (CI) has been a de facto standard for building industrial-strength software. Yet, there is little attention towards applying CI to the development of machine learning (ML) applications until the very recent effort on the theoretical side. In this paper, we take a step forward to bring the theory into practice.

We demonstrate ease.ml/snoopy, a data analytics system that performs feasibility analysis for machine learning (ML) applications before they are developed. Given a performance target of an ML application (e.g., accuracy above 0.95), ease.ml/snoopy provides a decisive answer to ML developers regarding whether the target is achievable or not. We formulate the feasibility analysis problem as an instance of Bayes error estimation. That is, for a data (distribution) on which the ML application should be performed, ease.ml/snoopy provides an estimate of the Bayes error - the minimum error rate that can be achieved by any classifier. It is well-known that estimating the Bayes error is a notoriously hard task. In ease.ml/snoopy we explore and employ estimators based on the combination of (1) nearest neighbor (NN) classifiers and (2) pre-trained feature transformations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on Bayes error estimation that combines (1) and (2). In today's cost-driven business world, feasibility of an ML project is an ideal piece of information for ML application developers - ease.ml/snoopy plays the role of a reliable " consultant. "

Developing machine learning (ML) applications is similar to developing traditional software --- it is often an iterative process in which developers navigate within a rich space of requirements, design decisions, implementations, empirical quality , and performance . In traditional software development, software engineering is the field of study which provides principled guidelines for this iterative process. However, as of today, the counterpart of "software engineering for ML" is largely missing --- developers of ML applications are left with powerful tools (e.g., TensorFlow and PyTorch) but little guidance regarding the development lifecycle itself. In this paper, we view the management of ML development life-cycles from a data management perspective. We demonstrate two closely related systems, ease.ml/ci and ease.ml/meter, that provide some "principled guidelines" for ML application development: ci is a continuous integration engine for ML models and meter is a "profiler" for controlling overfitting of ML models. Both systems focus on managing the "statistical generalization power" of datasets used for assessing the quality of ML applications, namely, the validation set and the test set . By demonstrating these two systems we hope to spawn further discussions within our community on building this new type of data management systems for statistical generalization.