Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by jvican on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @02:42PM
(#39982683)
Hey! I work on the ML Feature Infra at Netflix, operating a similar system to Chronon but with some crucial differences. What other alternatives aside from Starrocks did you evaluate as potential replacements prior to building Chronon? Curious if you got to try Tecton or Materialize.com.
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Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by nikhilsimha on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @03:19PM
(#39983131)
We haven’t tried materialize - IIUC materialized is pure kappa. Since we need to correct upstream data errors and forget selective data(GDPR) automatically - we need a lambda system.
Tecton, we evaluated, but decided that the time-travel strategy wasn’t scalable for our needs at the time.
A philosophical difference with tecton is that, we believe the compute primitives (aggregation and enrichment) need to be composable. We don’t have a FeatureSet or a TrainingSet for that reason - we instead have GroupBy and Join.
This enables chaining or composition to handle normalization (think 3NF) / star-schema in the warehouse.
Side benefit is that, non ml use-cases are able to leverage functionality within Chronon.
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by jamesblonde on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @03:57PM
(#39983565)
FeatureSets are mutable data and TrainingSets are consistent snapshots of feature data (from FeatureSets). I fail to see what that has to do with composability.
Join is still available for FeatureSets to enable composable feature views - join is resuse of feature data. GroupBy is just an aggregation in a feature pipeline, not sure your point here.
You can still do star schema (and even snowflake schema if you have the right abstractions).
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by jamesblonde on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @03:58PM
(#39983582)
Normalization is a model-dependent transformation and happens after the feature store - needs to be consistent between training and inference pipelines.
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by nikhilsimha on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @04:31PM
(#39983925)
Normalization is overloaded. I was referring to schema normalization (3NF etc) not feature normalization - like standard scaling etc.
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by jamesblonde on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @04:49PM
(#39984092)
Ok, but star schema is denormalized. Snowflake is normalized.
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by nikhilsimha on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @06:10PM
(#39984841)
To be pedantic, even in star schema - the dim tables are denormalized, fact tables are not.
I agree that my statement would be much better if used snowflake schema instead.
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by jvican on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @05:19PM
(#39984374)
Thank you for sharing!
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by throwaway2037 on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @11:04PM
(#39986566)
What is the meaning of pure kappa?
Re:Chronon, Airbnb's ML Feature Platform, Is Now Open Source
by pedrosorio on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @11:46PM
(#39986756)