Originally published in Pete Warden’s Blog, March 19, 2018
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I was recently chatting to a friend whose startup’s machine learning models were so disorganized it was causing serious problems as his team tried to build on each other’s work and share it with clients. Even the original author sometimes couldn’t train the same model and get similar results! He was hoping that I had a solution I could recommend, but I had to admit that I struggle with the same problems in my own work. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t worked with machine learning, but we’re still back in the dark ages when it comes to tracking changes and rebuilding models from scratch. It’s so bad it sometimes feels like stepping back in time to when we coded without source control.
When I started out programming professionally in the mid-90’s, the standard for keeping track and collaborating on source code was Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe. To give you a flavor of the experience, it didn’t have atomic check-ins, so multiple people couldn’t work on the same file, the network copy required nightly scans to avoid mysterious corruption, and even that was no guarantee the database would be intact in the morning. I felt lucky though, one of the places I interviewed at just had a wall of post-it notes, one for each file in the tree, and coders would take them down when they were modifying files, and return them when they were done!
This is all to say, I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to version control. I’ve toughed my way through some terrible systems, and I can still monkey together a solution using rsync and chicken wire if I have to. Even with all that behind me, I can say with my hand on my heart, that machine learning is by far the worst environment I’ve ever found for collaborating and keeping track of changes.
To explain why, here’s a typical life cycle of a machine learning model:
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About the Author:
Pete Warden, Engineer, CTO of Jetpac Inc, author of The Public Data Handbook and The Big Data Glossary for O’Reilly, builder of OpenHeatMap and the Data Science Toolkit, and other open source projects.
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