Published in Engineering @Varo·Oct 13, 2021Evolution of ML Platform @ VaroAuthors: Ritesh Agrawal, Mia F, Vinod Pazhettilkambarath, Viral Parikh Putting ML models in production requires a robust platform. In an earlier post, we discussed the design and architecture of Feature Store, one of the critical components of ML Platform. …Machine Learning6 min readMachine Learning6 min read
Published in Engineering @Varo·May 24, 2021Feature Store: Challenges and ConsiderationsAuthors: Ritesh Agrawal, Brandon Lee At Varo, our mission is to help millions of Americans achieve financial well-being by building a bank for all of us. We are investing in building Varo’s AI/ML platform to build, train and deploy models. While machine learning (ML) involves mathematics and algorithms, it is…Machine Learning6 min readMachine Learning6 min read
Feb 5, 2021Packaging Machine Learning Model The Right WayOne of the core principles of software engineering is “encapsulation”. However, this principle is often overlooked when deploying a machine-learned model. A machine-learned model is a composite of two things: transformations (such as One Hot Encoding, Imputing Values, etc.) and scoring (e.g., Linear Regression). …Machine Learning4 min readMachine Learning4 min read
Jan 31, 2021Databases Stored Procedure for Automated Change-logAssume you have a table where each row contains various features about customers. These features can be static (eg. account creation time, gender, etc) and/or dynamic (eg. “number of searches”, “last visited on”, etc). One of the challenges encountered in maintaining such a table is that different processes updated these…Machine Learning4 min readMachine Learning4 min read
Dec 11, 2020Demystifying PyTorch: Understanding interaction between various PyTorch abstractions.PyTorch is one of the most used libraries for deep learning but is also one of the very difficult libraries to understand due to lot of side-effects that one object can have over another. For instance, calling the “step” method of an optimizer updates the module object’s parameters. Trying to…Machine Learning7 min readMachine Learning7 min read
Jul 9, 2020Leveraging Annotation Library (PigeonXT) for Feature EngineeringOne of the first challenges in machine learning on structured data is “Feature Engineering.” It involves deciding whether to treat a variable as a numerical variable or a categorical variable and further to choose various transformations of data such as log transformation, one-hot encoding, target encoding, etc. These decisions are…Machine Learning2 min readMachine Learning2 min read
Jun 1, 2020AI²: Adaptive Infrastructure Using Artificial IntelligenceFrom self-driving cars to medical assistants, businesses have found a multitude of ways to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop smart and responsive products. However, I am often intrigued to notice that the application of machine learning at the infrastructure almost non-existing. For instance, while we have models…Machine Learning6 min readMachine Learning6 min read
Jun 12, 2019Sampling With Replacement In PrestoWhile analyzing an experiment data, I encountered an interesting brain teaser. I wanted to use the bootstrap method and for that needed to sample my data with replacement. After some iterations, I got the perfect way to do it. The trick is using UNNEST with sequence operation to duplicate the…Presto2 min readPresto2 min read
Aug 11, 2017Data Sampling In PrestoThe importance of “Sampling” cannot be overstated. The conclusions we draw from the data as well as the quality of the machine-learned model significantly depend on how we sample the data. However, there are many different ways to sample the data and expressing these different ways of sampling in SQL…Presto3 min readPresto3 min read
May 6, 2017The intuition behind R2 and other regression evaluation metricsThere are many metrics for evaluating a regression model. But often they seem cryptic. Below is an attempt to help understand the intuition two often used such metrics: mean/median absolute error and R2 (or the coefficient of determination) Average Accuracy of the Model (Mean/Median Absolute Error) Let’s assume you got a model that can predict house prices. Naturally…Machine Learning5 min readMachine Learning5 min read
