In this tutorial, we’ll build a simple machine learning pipeline in Pachyderm to train a regression model on housing market data to predict the value of homes in Boston.

Before You Start

  • You must have a Pachyderm cluster up and running
  • You should have some basic familiarity with Pachyderm pipeline specs – see the Transform and PFS Input sections in particular

Tutorial

Our Docker image’s user code for this tutorial is built on top of the civisanalytics/datascience-python base image, which includes the necessary dependencies. It uses pandas to import the structured dataset and the scikit-learn library to train the model.

1. Create a Project & Input Repo

2. Create a Regression Pipeline

Tip
The pipeline writes the output to a PFS repo (/pfs/out/) created with the same name as the pipeline.

3. Upload the Housing Dataset

4. Download Output Files

Once the pipeline is completed, we can download the files that were created.

When we inspect the learning curve, we can see that there is a large gap between the training score and the validation score. This typically indicates that our model could benefit from the addition of more data.

Now let’s update our dataset with additional examples.

5. Update the Dataset

Note
We could also append new examples to the existing file, but in this tutorial we’re overwriting our previous file to one with more data.

This is where Pachyderm truly starts to shine. The new commit of data to the housing_data repository automatically kicks off a job on the regression pipeline without us having to do anything.

When the job is complete we can download the new files and see that our model has improved, given the new learning curve.

6. Inspect the Pipeline Lineage

Since the pipeline versions all of our input and output data automatically, we can continue to iterate on our data and code while Pachyderm tracks all of our experiments.

For any given output commit, Pachyderm can tell us exactly which input commit of data was run. In this tutorial, we have only run 2 experiments so far, but this becomes incredibly valuable as your experiments continue to evolve and scale.


User Code Assets

The Docker image used in this tutorial was built with the following assets: