Partitioned Models – Oracle Machine Learning (OML)

Posted on July 13, 2020 Updated on June 23, 2020

Building machine learning models can be a relatively trivial task. But getting to that point and understanding what to do next can be challenging. Yes the task of creating a model is simple and usually takes a few line of code. This is what is shown in most examples. But when you try to apply to real world problems we are faced with other challenges. Some of which include volume of data is larger, building efficient ML pipelines is challenging, time to create models gets longer, applying models to new data in real-time takes longer (not possible in real-time), etc. Yes these are typically challenges and most of these can be easily overcome.

When building ML solutions for real-world problem you will be faced with building (and deploying) many 10s or 100s of ML models. Why are so many models needed? Almost every example we see for ML takes the entire data set and build a model on that data. When you think about it, not everyone in the data set can be considered in the same grouping (similar characteristics). If we were to build a model on the data set and apply it to new data, we will get a generic prediction. A prediction comparing the new data item (new customer, purchase, etc) with everyone else in the data population. Maybe this is why so many ML project fail as they are building generic solution that performs badly when run on new (and evolving) data.

To overcome this we start to look at the different groups of data in the data set. Can the data set be divided into a number of different parts based on some characteristics. If we could do this and build a separate model on each group (or cluster), then we would have ML models that would be more accurate with their predictions. This is where we will end up creating 10s or 100s of models. As you can imagine the work involved in doing this with be LOTs. Then think about all the coding needed to manage all of this. What about the complexity of all the code needed for making the predictions on new data.

Yes all of this gets complex very, very quickly!
Ideally we want a separate model for each group

But how can you do that efficiently? is it possible?

When working with Oracle Machine Learning, you can use a feature called partitioned models. Partitioned Models are designed to handle this type of problem. They are designed to:

• make the building of models simple
• scales as the data and number of partitions increase
• includes all the steps part of the ML pipeline (all the data prep, transformations, etc)
• make predicting new data using the ML model simple
• make the deployment of the ML model easy
• make the MLOps process simple
• make the use of ML model easy to use by all developers no matter the programming language
• make the ML model build and ML model scoring quick and with better, more accurate predictions.

Let us work through an example. In this example lets start by creating a Random Forest ML model using the entire data set. The following code shows setting up the Parameters settings table. The second code segment creates the Random Forest ML model. The training data set being used in this example contains 72,000 records.

BEGIN
  DELETE FROM BANKING_RF_SETTINGS;

  INSERT INTO banking_RF_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
  VALUES (dbms_data_mining.algo_name, dbms_data_mining.algo_random_forest);

  INSERT INTO banking_RF_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
  VALUES (dbms_data_mining.prep_auto, dbms_data_mining.prep_auto_on);

 COMMIT;
END;
/

-- Create the ML model
DECLARE
   v_start_time  TIMESTAMP;
BEGIN
   DBMS_DATA_MINING.DROP_MODEL('BANKING_RF_72K_1');

   v_start_time := current_timestamp;

   DBMS_DATA_MINING.CREATE_MODEL(
      model_name          => 'BANKING_RF_72K_1',
      mining_function     => dbms_data_mining.classification,
      data_table_name     => 'BANKING_72K',
      case_id_column_name => 'ID',
      target_column_name  => 'TARGET',
      settings_table_name => 'BANKING_RF_SETTINGS');

   dbms_output.put_line('Time take to create model = ' || to_char(extract(second from (current_timestamp-v_start_time))) || ' seconds.');
END;
/

This is the basic setup and the following table illustrates how long the CREATE_MODEL function takes to run for different sizes of training datasets and with different number of trees per model. The default number of trees is 20.

To run this model against new data we could use something like the following SQL query.

SELECT cust_id, target,
       prediction(BANKING_RF_72K_1 USING *)  predicted_value,
       prediction_probability(BANKING_RF_72K_1 USING *) probability
FROM   bank_test_v;

This is simple and straight forward to use.

For the 72,000 records it takes just approx 5.23 seconds to create the model, which includes creating 20 Decision Trees. As mentioned earlier, this will be a generic model covering the entire data set.

To create a partitioned model, we can add new parameter which lists the attributes to use to partition the data set. For example, if the partition attribute is MARITAL, we see it has four different values. This means when this attribute is used as the partition attribute, Oracle Machine Learning will create four separate sub Random Forest models all until the one umbrella model. This means the above SQL query to run the model, does not change and the correct sub model will be selected to run on the data based on the value of MARITAL attribute.

To create this partitioned model you need to add the following to the settings table.

BEGIN
  DELETE FROM BANKING_RF_SETTINGS;

  INSERT INTO banking_RF_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
  VALUES (dbms_data_mining.algo_name, dbms_data_mining.algo_random_forest);

  INSERT INTO banking_RF_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
  VALUES (dbms_data_mining.prep_auto, dbms_data_mining.prep_auto_on);

  INSERT INTO banking_RF_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
  VALUES (dbms_data_mining.odms_partition_columns, 'MARITAL’);

COMMIT;
END;
/

The code to create the model remains the same!

The code to call and use the model remains the same!

This keeps everything very simple and very easy to use.

When I ran the CREATE_MODEL code for the partitioned model, it took approx 8.3 seconds to run. Yes it took slightly longer than the previous example, but this time it is creating four models instead of one. This is still very quick!

What if I wanted to add more attributes to the partition key? Yes you can do that. The more attributes you add, the more sub-models will be be created.

For example, if I was to add JOB attribute to the partition key list. I will now get 48 sub-models (with 20 Decision Trees each) being created. The JOB attribute has 12 distinct values, multiplied by the 4 values for MARITAL, gives us 48 models.

INSERT INTO banking_RF_settings (setting_name, setting_value)
VALUES (dbms_data_mining.odms_partition_columns, 'MARITAL,JOB');

How long does this take the CREATE_MODEL code to run? approx 37 seconds!

Again that is quick!

Again remember the code to create the model and to run the model to predict on new data does not change. This means our applications using this ML model does not change. This shows us we can very easily increase the predictive accuracy of our models with only adding one additional model, and by improving this accuracy by adding more attributes to the partition key.

But you do need to be careful with what attributes to include in the partition key. If the attributes have a very high number of distinct values, will result in 100s, or 1000s of sub models being created.

An important benefit of using partitioned models is when a new distinct value occurs in one of the partition key attributes. You code to create the parameters and models does not change. OML will automatically will pick this up and do all the work under the hood.