Slides from my talk at Data Science London on 25th August 2015 about our experience open sourcing Seldon, an enterprise-grade machine learning platform for developers and data scientists that was previously a "black box" API. This is a repeat of my #papis2015 talk with further information about how microservices enable you to extend Seldon with your own algorithms, and third-party libraries and APIs.
The algorithms that I ran through in the Q&A:
1. User Clusters - improve relevance in high churn services.
2. Tag Affinity - focused tag-based associations.
3. Latent Factor Models - best for lower churn service.
4. Item Activity Correlation - built for static slowly changing historical items.
5. Topic Models - built for sites needing long tail recommendation.
6. Association Rules - basket analysis used in e-commerce to suggest the next best action.
7. Content Similarity - built for services with rich metadata and high sparsity across items.
More information: http://www.seldon.io
Seldon Tech Docs: http://docs.seldon.io
Seldon on Github: https://github.com/SeldonIO/seldon-server
We're hiring: http://www.seldon.io/careers
5. SELDON.IO
How to add machine intelligence to your company
Build In-House
3rd Party API
Open Predictive
Platform
Control Model
Evaluation
Time Data Scientists Cost
$$$✔️
Too Many
$$✗
Limited /
Unknown
$✔️
Industry Models +
Your Own
10. SELDON.IO
Seldon Microservices
Seldon
Server
Your
App or
Service
GET /predict
GET /recommend
P1 Vowpal Wabbit
P2 XGBoost
POST
/users
/items
/actions
GET /recommend
POST /events
GET /predict
Internal
Microservices API
External REST API
R1
Collaborative
Deep Learning
RN Your algorithm!
12. SELDON.IO
How do you make money?(the elephant in the room)
OS
Enterprise Services
MLaaS
Partner Ecosystem
13. SELDON.IO
Conclusions
• Data scientists want more control.
• Open source costs less AND gives more control than SaaS.
• When given the option, many companies want to start with
SaaS.
• Developers love open source and are awesome advocates.
• Microservices are a great way to put your algorithms and
models into production.
• Let’s build an ecosystem and work together.
INTRO
I just travelled all the way to Sydney to give this talk earlier this month, so I’m happy to halve my carbon footprint by having the chance to share this with the Data Science community in London!
We released Seldon’s open source predictive platform in Feb after four years of R&D from an exceptional team of data scientists.
Seldon is tried and tested as a closed API in demanding enterprise environment serving billions of recommendations every month.
Last AUGUST- 2 choices
I will talk about how OS helped us to survive and thrive.
This is not meant to be a an evangelical talk about how I have “seen the light”, I want you share with you some of the things we have learned from moving closed to open.
[set the scene] You’re in a hot, Sweaty board room, mid-Summer,
We were a SaaS predictive API with two PRODUCTS: Recommendation Engine and Predictive Social Sharing.
FACED WITH 2 OPTIONS:
1. GET ACQUI-HIRED
2. START SOMETHING NEW
We had spent the prev 9 months speaking to potential acquirers. During this process I had a front row seat on the priorities of some of world’s leading media, ecommerce, technology companies.
COMMON PATTERN emerged: large companies putting data science and prediction at the very top if their strategic agenda for investment. They were acquisitive and recruiting expensive teams.
Made me think: WHAT WOULD BE THE IMPACT OF MAKING THE FULL PREDICTIVE STACK OPEN SOURCE?
So I decided to take the business in a new open source direction.
WHY? Data scientists want more CONTROL to solve the problems specific to their business.
PARATOS LAW in action – people should be spending 80% of their time solving the 20% of the domain-specific problems that make the biggest impact on their business, but otherwise data scientists are focusing on the remaining 80% and wasting time on reinventing the wheel.
I’ll share with you a quick analogy with this DJ MIXER:
Each channel on the mixer represents a predictive model.
The controls represent hyper-parameters.
Data scientist is the DJ listening to the audience and adjusting the controls accordingly.
Seldon gives the DJ super powers. Enabling them to play all of the stages of a festival at the same time, so your audiences is not stuck listening to Lionel Richie (collaborative filtering) if you want to listen to Metallica (matrix factorization)
But remember, you can always tap the DJ on the shoulder and make special requests.
Build in house: DEMAND - there are far fewer for truly skilled machine learning and AI developers than big data engineers. Improving internal data science capabilities is increasingly important for companies. So they are hiring or aquahiring teams of data scientists.
3rd party: DATA SECURITY - there are many companies with data control policies that require the hosting of consumer data behind their firewall, which a flexible open source solution will allow.
Sometimes there’s no transparency on algorithms.
Open Source. MARKET DISRUPTION Open source technologies such as Docker, Hadoop, and Apache Spark, have superseded proprietary operating systems and databases. Meanwhile, most vendors higher up the data science stack (i.e. providing predictive analytics, recommendations, and machine learning APIs) are effectively licensing black box solutions. Seldon wants to reduce barriers to entry and get the Seldon’s technology that we believe in the hands of as many developers as possible.
Businesses wanting to solve their own / domain-specific problems.
ADD PRIVACY….
Seldon isn’t an OS library, it’s an end-to-end machine learning PIPELINE. Include best of Open Source and algorithms built ourselves.
1. CONNECT YOUR DATA - Ingesting behavioural data from events that contains metadata and context such as device and location.
2. MODEL BUILDING - Multiple models are built based on desired Goals (Could be a KPI or an action/event).
Behavioral data plus algorithms are used to train the predictive models. computationally inefficient to store all the possible alternatives… realtime behavioural data needs to update the models in real-time. value not in the algorithm, the value is in the model.
INDUSTRY MODEL - working in media, advertising and ecommerce.
3. OUTPUTS - there are currently two outputs for Seldon - one is a recommendation and another is a prediction (score).
FEEDBACK LOOP - Models are optimised in a recursive way…
FURTHER INFO
Seldon pulls in behavioral data from any digital environment, builds predictive models and outputs recommendations and predictions at SCALE.
But have built a generic platform with a broad range of applications including finance, insurance and healthcare.
There are INFINITE algorithm configurations to choose from. So which ones are best for my business?
Example of when different models used: high/low churn, days of week. Userbase or product mix changes. Seasonal changes.
YOU CAN USE YOUR OWN ALGORITHMS AND MODELS.
The model selection will vary depending on the user type.
OLD WAY - AB testing. each test used to be a manual process measure the impact of recommendations on KPIs such as CTR, conversion rate, etc..
NEW WAY – CONTINUOUS TESTING of all models that diverts more traffic towards the model performing best at that specific point in time. Called a MULTI-ARMED BANDIT, inspired by a strategy to play a room full of slot machines.
Give a user case of which algorithms would be used high churn news environment. You want to make the case that it’s not 1 algorithm/model but a combination of different models that will maximise your KPI.
And that’s why you need Seldon. We A/B test from set of INDUSTRY MODELS to find a combination of model selections that work best for your business for a given user at a given time. TIME SAVED in choosing the best model. Seldon increases the productivity of your data science teams and helps your business to increase profits through rapid prototyping and better KPI performance.
3. OPEN SOURCE
SETUP. SaaS platform grows roots, provisioning usually internal process with continuous integration and deployment. Rarely setup new infrastructure from scratch. VIRTUAL MACHINE.
DOCUMENTATION. SaaS businesses don’t need as much. Docs on Github so people can commit changes – first pull requests. Documentation gets the highest engagement to see how to use it. [show documentation]
COMMUNITY – newsletter, github, detail release notes, clean codebase, future: events, etc. Important for us.
CHOOSING A LICENSE. Reason for Apache 2 vs LGPL/GPL – better for business because they don’t have to make modifications open source.
SALES CYCLE – pros: more leads, and cons: longer w light touch. Previously contract / trial with decision makers before getting tech in hands of developers. TRACKING – companies can be much further along the funnel because they don’t have to sign up to get started. Example call from major tech company.
VALUE CHAIN – where we sit now we have disrupted ourselves.
TIMING (OS more strategic and sometimes SaaS is a better option).
SAAS – open source is a great driver of SaaS customers. Many companies want to start with SaaS and have a longer term plan to move on prem and work with custom algos.
4. SELDON CONTAINER INFRASTRUCTURE
MAIN COMPONENTS – REST API SERVERS, ZOOKEEPER, FLUENTD, KAFKA, SPARK, MEMCACHE, JDBC database…
VIRTUAL MACHINE - Setting up infrastructure is complex. Portable - Developer can download it and straight away access the infrastructure. Movie demo.
DOCKER / AMIs - technology that allows you to use on different platforms (docker container = shipping container. Part of our infrastructure in each container). Deploy on premise, cloud (AWS, Google) or SaaS. [encourage people to register for AMIs]
Recommendations using EXTERNAL REST API
Predictions takes JSON of /events data and provides regression and classification outputs.
Microservices /predictions with Vowpal Wabbit
Example /recommendations microservices – including Collaborative Deep Learning from the KDD talk.
MICROSERVICES – make the Seldon stack completely pluggable with third party code / algos developed by your data scientists IN ANY LANGUAGE (R, Python, etc) that can be put into production and utilise the same pipeline as core Seldon algorithms.
OPEN SOURCE LIBRARIES – we already used microservices to connect an OS library called Vowpal Wabbit (Yahoo research) to power our new predict endpoint. This enables regression, binary and multi-class classification. We are connected to the leading machine intelligence libraries such as Torch.
CLOSED APIs – third parties who provide We can leverage third party APIs such as IBM Watson for personality insights or text to speech.
ENTERPRISE DISTRIBUTIONS – Seldon are already planning integrations with some of the leading enterprise distributions.
(quite often this is the elephant in the room – it’s often the first question we get asked)
OS is revolutionising the way in which we do business. Since we released Seldon in Feb it is already starting to be used by world’s largest companies.
FREE - First, don’t expect more than a small percentage of activated users to pay.
ADVISORY. ML is complicated and more projects have unique requirements. Advisory services, enables us to spend more time with customers, understanding their problems so ultimately leads to building a better platform.
MLAAS. Finally, we have a SaaS platform! Many companies find us via the OS but SaaS the best starting point. Companies like the MIGRATION PATH [can reference later in call for open models]
ECOSYSTEM. Third party technology, APIs and models. Also UNIFY AND MONETISE the DATA. Value in creating an ecosystem. Seldon can offer distribution and monetization.
Data scientists and SALES
Come and work at WARNER YARD
We’re also FUND RAISING…
BEFORE TAKING SOME QUESTIONS, I’LL FINISH WITH A QUESTION.
Can we change the way in which people view their competition? London is become a centre of excellence for AI. And companies that collaborate as part of an ecosystems have a competitive advantage.
Since Seldon went OS had an open door policy about speaking to “competitors”.
Download Seldon’s open source, VM or AMI... visit seldon.io or develors head on over to docs.seldon.io
Contact me if you would like to help out or to discuss how we can help add machine intelligence into your business. Or other AI companies that want to partner.
THANK YOU