Catch Me If You Can: Keeping up with ML in Production

Software organizations are increasingly incorporating machine learning (ML) into their product offerings, driving a need for new data management tools. Many of these tools facilitate the initial development and deployment of ML applications, contributing to a crowded landscape of disconnected solutions targeted at different stages, or components, of the ML lifecycle. A lack of end-to-end ML pipeline visibility makes it hard to address any issues that may arise after a production deployment, such as unexpected output values or lower-quality predictions. We introduce our prototype and our vision for mltrace, a platform-agnostic system that provides observability to ML practitioners by (1) executing predefined tests and monitoring ML-specific metrics at component runtime, (2) tracking end-to-end data flow, and (3) allowing users to ask arbitrary post-hoc questions about pipeline health. This tutorial specifically focuses on using mltrace to build and execute tests for ML pipelines.