Make Crucial Predictions as Data Comes

Flink to the rescue! Make real-time predictions.

fat-squirrel-with-nut-in-mouth

Flink: as fast as a squirrel

Walking by the hottest IT streets in these days means you've likely heard about
achieving Streaming Machine Learning, i.e. moving AI towards streaming scenario and
exploiting the real-time capabilities along with new Artificial Intelligence
techniques. Moreover, you will also notice the lack of research related to this
topic, despite the growing interest in it.

If we try to investigate it a little bit deeper then, we realize that a step is

missing: nowadays, well-known streaming applications still don't get the concept of
Model Serving properly, and industries still lean on lambda architecture in order
to achieve the goal. Suppose a bank has a concrete frequently updated batch trained
Machine Learning model (e.g. an optimized Gradient Descent applied to past buffer
overflow attack attempts) and it wants to deploy the model directly to their own
canary.

Distributed IDS - backed by the streaming system � in order to achieve real-time

responses about the quality of the model. Notionally, the bank should have the
opportunity to automatically load the trained model to the IDS and exploit it in
real-time in order to compute predictions on incoming events, achieving persisted
and always up to date covering, online fraud detection, and saving a lot of money.

You may also like: Apache Flink Basic Transformation Example.

Unfortunately, it happens that the bank is forced to distribute the model across
the infrastructure with a pre-defined layout, and � most of the time � you have to
deploy directly your weight vector and compute predictions by hard programming math
instructions on it; given the cumbersome reality, the bank will lean on the good
safe old parallel batch job which investigates persisted events as they come
available to disk. In order to solve this huge gap, herein we present Flink-JPMML
(repo), a fresh-made open-source Scala library aimed at achieving streaming Model
Serving predictions at scale on Apache Flink real-time engine.

As Fast as Squirrels
Apache Flink is an open-source distributed streaming-first processing engine; it
provides high-availability and exactly-once consistency as long as real-time
complex event processing at ridiculous scale. Flink also provides batch computation
as a sub-case of streaming. Radicalbit uses Flink at its core and still, it amazes
for efficiency, robustness and scalability features, making itself perfectly
fitting the core of a Kappa architecture.

PMML stands for Predictive Mark-Up Model Language, and it represents a well-
established standard for the persistence of Machine Learning models across
different systems. PMML is based on a really efficient xml semantic, which allows
defining trained unsupervised/supervised, probabilistic, and deep learning models
in order to persist a source-independent trained model. This can be
imported/exported by any system. We employed the JPMML-evaluator library in order
to adopt the standard within Flink-jpmml.Coming at this step, we're ready to put
our hands dirty.

User-Defined Predictions Like Flink API

First of all, in order to run Flink-JPMML add the following dependency: if you're a
sbt-er, then

"io.radicalbit" %% "flink-jpmml-scala" % "0.6.3"

For maven users instead

<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.radicalbit</groupId>
<artifactId>flink-jpmml-scala</artifactId>
<version>0.6.3</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

Probably, you�ll need also to publish the library locally; in order to do that,
follow these steps:

Launch sbt interface within the flink -> sbt.

Jump in flink-jpmml-scala project directory > project flink-jpmml-scala.
Publish the library at your local repo > publishLocal.
At this point, flink-jpmml expects scala-core, flink-streaming and flink-clients
libraries as provided. Let�s go ahead. Wherever your PMML model resides, just
provide the path to it.

val sourcePath = "/path/to/your/pmml/model.xml"

This will be the only thing you need to bother about: Flink-JPMML automatically
checks the distributed backend accordingly to Flink by implementing a dedicated
ModelReader.

import io.radicalbit.flink.pmml.scala.api.reader.ModelReader
val modelReader = ModelReader(sourcePath)

Now, let's define an input stream.

import org.apache.flink.streaming.api.scala._
case class IrisInput(pLength: Double, pWidth: Double, sLength: Double, sWidth:
Double, timestamp: Long, color: Int, prediction: Option[String]) {
def toVector: Vector = DenseVector(pLength, pWidth, sLength, sWidth)
}
val env = StreamExecutionEnvironment.getExecutionEnvironment
val events: DataStream[IrisInput] = yourIrisSource(env)

Here we go. The following point import

import io.radicalbit.flink.pmml.scala._

extends Flink DataStream with the evaluate method. Strictly speaking, it provides
you the tool which lets us achieve streaming predictions in real-time.

import io.radicalbit.flink.pmml.scala._
import org.apache.flink.ml.math.Vector
val out = events.evaluate(modelReader) { (event, model) =>
// flink pmml model requires to be evaluated against Flink Vectors
val vectorEvent: Vector = event.toVector
// now we can call model: PmmlModel predict method
val prediction = model.predict(vectorEvent)
// Prediction container own the prediction result as a ADT called Score
prediction match {
case Prediction(Score(value)) =>
// return the event with updated prediction
event.copy(kind = Some(computeKind(value)))
case Prediction(EmptyScore) =>
// return just the event
logger.info("It was not possible to predict event {}", event); event
}
out.print()
env.execute("Flink JPMML simple execution.")
}
private def computeKind(value: Double): String = {
value match {
case 1.0 => "Iris-setosa"
case 2.0 => "Iris-versicolor"
case 3.0 => "Iris-virginica"
case _ => "other"
}
}

Now, you can take the sample PMML clustering model available here with the only
duty to add class as output parameter; so lets simply add

<groupid>MiningField name="class" invalidValueTreatment="asIs"

usageType="predicted"/</groupid>

to the mining fields list. Then, add class as output

<groupid>Output</groupid>
<groupid>OutputField name="PCluster" optype="class" dataType="integer"
targetField="class" feature="entityId"/</groupid>
<groupid>/Output</groupid>

At this point, we�re ready to execute our job. Flink-JPMML will send you a log
message about the loading state:

19/09/10 14:33:11 INFO package$RichDataStream$$anon$1: Model has been read

successfully, model name: k-means
Finally, we have the operator output against some random flowers.

IrisInput(5.7,1.8,2.5,0.7, 34, 1495635020923, Some(Other))

IrisInput(5.5,3.8,5.2,4.3, 93, 1495635020233, Some(Iris-setosa))
IrisInput(4.3,2.3,2.0,3.1, 122, 1495635020100, Some(Other))
IrisInput(5.1,5.7,4.8,2.1,255, 1495635020583, Some(Iris-versicolor))
IrisInput(4.2,0.8,0.9,2.6, 0, 1495635020921, Some(Iris-virginica))

Flink-JPMML brings also a shortcut in order to perform quick predictions over a

DataStream of Flink vectors. This feature comes as follow:

val vectorStream = events.map(_.toVector)

val predictions: (Prediction, Vector) = vectorStream.evaluate(reader)

This comes extremely useful if the user needs to apply concrete math preprocessing
before the evaluation and only the prediction result is required (e.g. model
quality assessment).

What Happens Behind the Scenes?

Given a simple and easy to use API structure, flink-jpmml attempts to target out
all the performance, making Flink one of the most powerful distributed processing
engines today.

The Reader
The ModelReader object aims at retrieving the PMML model from every Flink supported
distributed system; namely speaking, it�s able to load from any supported
distributed file system (e.g. HDFS, Alluxio). The model reader instance is
delivered to the Task Managers and the latter will leverage the former�s API at
operator materialization time only: that means the model is lazily ridden.

The Model
The library allows Flink to load the model by the employment of a singleton loader
per Task Manager, so it does read independently from the number of sub-tasks
running on each TM. This optimization lets Flink scale the model evaluation in
thread-safety, considering that even really base PMMLs can grow over several
hundreds of MBs.

Evaluation as UDF
The evaluate method implements an underlying FlatMap implementation, and it�s
enriched by the above-described user-defined function, provided by the user as a
partial function. Formerly, the idea was to create something a-la-flinkML, i.e. a
core object shaped by strategy patterns in order to compute predictions just like
you�d do if you make use of typical ML libraries.

But, at the end of the day, we�re performing a streaming task, so the user has the
unbounded input event and the model as an instance of PmmlModel. Herein Flink-JPMML
demands the user to compute the prediction only, but anyway, the UDF allows to
apply any kind of custom operation and any serializable output type is allowed.

Closing
We introduced a scalable light-weight library called Flink-JPMML, exploiting Apache
Flink capabilities as a real-time processing engine and offering a brand-new way to
serve any of your Machine Learning models exported with PMML standard. Along with
the next post, we will discuss how Flink-JPMML lets the user manage NaN values and
we will describe how the library handles failures; alongside, we will provide the
reason behind Flink vector choice and we will point out the steps we expect to
follow in order to keep this library better.

We�d be really pleased to welcome new contributors to Flink-JPMML, just check the
repository and the open issues.