Question 134 - Professional Machine Learning Engineer discussion

The best option for determining how often to retrain your model to maintain a high level of performance while minimizing cost is to run training-serving skew detection batch jobs every few days. Training-serving skew refers to the discrepancy between the distributions of the features in the training dataset and the serving data. This can cause the model to perform poorly on the new data, as it is not representative of the data that the model was trained on. By running training-serving skew detection batch jobs, you can monitor the changes in the feature distributions over time, and identify when the skew becomes significant enough to affect the model performance. If skew is detected, you can send the most recent serving data to the labeling service, and use the labeled data to retrain your model. This option has the following benefits:

It allows you to retrain your model only when necessary, based on the actual data changes, rather than on a fixed schedule or a heuristic. This can save you the cost of the labeling service and the retraining process, and also avoid overfitting or underfitting your model.

It leverages the existing tools and frameworks for training-serving skew detection, such as TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV) and Vertex Data Labeling. TFDV is a library that can compute and visualize descriptive statistics for your datasets, and compare the statistics across different datasets. Vertex Data Labeling is a service that can label your data with high quality and low latency, using either human labelers or automated labelers.

It integrates well with the MLOps practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which can automate the workflow of running the skew detection jobs, sending the data to the labeling service, retraining the model, and deploying the new model version.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Training an anomaly detection model on the training dataset, and running all incoming requests through this model, introduces additional complexity and overhead. This option requires building and maintaining a separate model for anomaly detection, which can be challenging and time-consuming. Moreover, this option requires running the anomaly detection model on every request, which can increase the latency and resource consumption of the prediction service. Additionally, this option may not capture the subtle changes in the feature distributions that can affect the model performance, as anomalies are usually defined as rare or extreme events.

Option B: Identifying temporal patterns in your model's performance over the previous year, and creating a schedule for sending serving data to the labeling service for the next year, introduces additional assumptions and risks. This option requires analyzing the historical data and model performance, and finding the patterns that can explain the variations in the model performance over time. However, this can be difficult and unreliable, as the patterns may not be consistent or predictable, and may depend on various factors that are not captured by the data. Moreover, this option requires creating a schedule based on the past patterns, which may not reflect the future changes in the data or the environment. This can lead to either sending too much or too little data to the labeling service, resulting in either wasted cost or degraded performance.

Option C: Comparing the cost of the labeling service with the lost revenue due to model performance degradation over the past year, and adjusting the frequency of model retraining accordingly, introduces additional challenges and trade-offs. This option requires estimating the cost of the labeling service and the lost revenue due to model performance degradation, which can be difficult and inaccurate, as they may depend on various factors that are not easily quantifiable or measurable. Moreover, this option requires finding the optimal balance between the cost and the performance, which can be subjective and variable, as different stakeholders may have different preferences and expectations. Furthermore, this option may not account for the potential impact of the model performance degradation on other aspects of the business, such as customer satisfaction, retention, or loyalty.