Tag: pmml 4

Predictive Models Ain’t Easy to Deploy

 

This is a guest blog post by Carole Ann Matignon of Sparkling Logic. You can see more on Sparkling Logic at http://my.sparklinglogic.com/

Decision Management is about combining predictive models and business rules to automate decisions for your business. Insurance underwriting, loan origination or workout, claims processing are all very good use cases for that discipline… But there is a hiccup… It ain’t as easy you would expect…

What’s easy?

If you have a neat model, then most tools would allow you to export it as a PMML model – PMML stands for Predictive Model Markup Language and is a standard XML representation for predictive model formulas. Many model development tools let you export it without much effort. Many BRMS – Business rules Management Systems – let you import it. Tada… The model is ready for deployment.

What’s hard?

The problem that we keep seeing over and over in the industry is the issue around variables.

Those neat predictive models are formulas based on variables that may or may not exist as is in your object model. When the variable is itself a formula based on the object model, like the min, max or sum of Dollar amount spent in Groceries in the past 3 months, and the object model comes with transaction details, such that you can compute it by iterating through those transactions, then the problem is not “that” big. PMML 4 introduced some support for those variables.

The issue that is not easy to fix, and yet quite frequent, is when the model development data model does not resemble the operational one. Your Data Warehouse very likely flattened the object model, and pre-computed some aggregations that make the mapping very hard to restore.

It is clearly not an impossible project as many organizations do that today. It comes with a significant overhead though that forces modelers to involve IT resources to extract the right data for the model to be operationalized. It is a heavy process that is well justified for heavy-duty models that were developed over a period of time, with a significant ROI.

This is a show-stopper though for other initiatives which do not have the same ROI, or would require too frequent model refresh to be viable. Here, I refer to “real” model refresh that involves a model reengineering, not just a re-weighting of the same variables.

For those initiatives where time is of the essence, the challenge will be to bring closer those two worlds, the modelers and the business rules experts, in order to streamline the development AND deployment of analytics beyond the model formula. The great opportunity I see is the potential for a better and coordinated tuning of the cut-off rules in the context of the model refinement. In other words: the opportunity to refine the strategy as a whole. Very ambitious? I don’t think so.

About Carole Ann Matignon

http://my.sparklinglogic.com/index.php/company/management-team

Carole-Ann Matignon Print E-mail

Carole-Ann MatignonCarole-Ann Matignon – Co-Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer

She is a renowned guru in the Decision Management space. She created the vision for Decision Management that is widely adopted now in the industry.  Her claim to fame is managing the strategy and direction of Blaze Advisor, the leading BRMS product, while she also managed all the Decision Management tools at FICO (business rules, predictive analytics and optimization). She has a vision for Decision Management both as a technology and a discipline that can revolutionize the way corporations do business, and will never get tired of painting that vision for her audience.  She speaks often at Industry conferences and has conducted university classes in France and Washington DC.

She started her career building advanced systems using all kinds of technologies — expert systems, rules, optimization, dashboarding and cubes, web search, and beta version of database replication. At Cleversys (acquired by Kurt Salmon & Associates), she also conducted strategic consulting gigs around change management.

While playing with advanced software components, she found a passion for technology and joined ILOG (acquired by IBM). She developed a growing interest in Optimization as well as Business Rules. At ILOG, she coined the term BRMS while brainstorming with her Sales counterpart. She led the Presales organization for Telecom in the Americas up until 2000 when she joined Blaze Software (acquired by Brokat Technologies, HNC Software and finally FICO).

Her 360-degree experience allowed her to gain appreciation for all aspects of a software company, giving her a unique perspective on the business. Her technical background kept her very much in touch with technology as she advanced.

PMML 4.0

There are some nice changes in the PMML 4.0 version. PMML is the XML version for data modeling , or specificallyquoting the DMG group itself

PMML uses XML to represent mining models. The structure of the models is described by an XML Schema. One or more mining models can be contained in a PMML document. A PMML document is an XML document with a root element of type PMML. The general structure of a PMML document is:

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <PMML version="4.0"
    xmlns="http://www.dmg.org/PMML-4_0"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" >

    <Header copyright="Example.com"/>
    <DataDictionary> ... </DataDictionary>

    ... a model ...

  </PMML>

So what is new in version 4. Here are some powerful modeling changes. For anyone with any XML knowledge PMML is the way to go.

PMML 4.0 – Changes from PMML 3.2

Associations

  • Itemset and AssociationRule elements are no longer enclosed within a “Choice” element

  • Added different scoring procedures: recommendation, exclusiveRecommendation and ruleAssociation with explanation and example
  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)

BuiltinFunctions

Added the following functions:
  • isMissing
  • isNotMissing
  • equal
  • notEqual
  • lessThan
  • lessOrEqual
  • greaterThan
  • greaterOrEqual
  • isIn
  • isNotIn
  • and
  • or
  • not
  • isIn
  • isNotIn
  • if

Click on Image for better resolution

ClusteringModel

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

Conformance

  • Changed all version references from “3.2” to “4.0”

DataDictionary

  • No changes

Functions

  • No changes

GeneralRegression

  • Changed to allow for Cox survival models and model ensembles
    • Add new model type: CoxRegression.
    • Allow empty regression model when model type is CoxRegression, so that baseline-only model could be represented.
    • Add new optional model attributes: endTimeVariable, startTimeVariable, subjectIDVariable, statusVariable, baselineStrataVariable, modelDF.
    • Add optional Matrix in Predictor to specify a contrast matrix, optional attribute referencePoint in Parameter.
    • Add new elements: BaseCumHazardTables, EventValues, BaselineStratum, BaselineCell.
    • Add examples of scoring for Cox Regression and contrast matrices.
    • Add new type of distribution: tweedie.
    • Add new attribute in model: targetReferenceCategory, so that the model can be used in MiningModel.

    • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
    • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

GeneralStructure

Header

  • No changes

Interoperability

  • Changed: “As a result, a new approach for interoperability was required and is being introduced in PMML version 3.2.” to “As a result, a new approach for interoperability was introduced in PMML version 3.2.”

MiningSchema

  • Added frequencyWeight and analysisWeight as new options for usageType. They will not affect scoring, but will make model information more complete.

ModelComposition — No longer used, replaced by MultipleModels

ModelExplanation

  • New addition to PMML 4.0 that contains information to explain the models, model fit statistics, and visualization information.

ModelVerification

  • No changes

MultipleModels

  • Replaces ModelComposition. Important additions are segmentation and ensembles.
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

NaïveBayes

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

NeuralNetwork

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

Output

  • Extended output type to include Association rule models. The changes add a number of new attributes: “ruleFeature”, “algorithm”, “rank”, “rankBasis”, “rankOrder” and “isMultiValued”. A new enumeration type “ruleValue” is added to the RESULT-FEATURE

Regression

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

RuleSet

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

Sequence

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)

Statistics

  • accommodate weighted counts by replacing INT-ARRAY with NUM-ARRAY in DiscrStats and ContStats
  • change xs:nonNegativeInteger to xs:double in several places
  • add new boolean attribute ‘weighted’ to UnivariateStats and PartitionFieldStats elements
  • add new attribute cardinality in Counts
  • Also some very long lines in this document are now wrapped.

SupportVectorMachine

  • Added optional attribute threshold
  • Added optional attribute classificationMethod
  • Attribute alternateTargetCategory removed from SupportVectorMachineModel element and moved to SupportVectorMachine element
  • Changed the example slightly
  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

Targets

  • No changes

Taxonomy

  • Changed: “A TableLocator may contain any description which helps an application to locate a certain table. PMML 3.2 does not yet define the content. PMML users have to use their own extensions. The same applies to InlineTable.” to “A TableLocator may contain any description which helps an application to locate a certain table. PMML standard does not yet define the content. PMML users have to use their own extensions. The same applies to InlineTable.”

Text

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

TimeSeriesModel

  • New addition to PMML 4.0 to support Time series models

Transformations

  • No changes

TreeModel

  • Changed version to “4.0” from “3.2” in the example(s)
  • Added reference to ModelExplanation element in the model XSD

Sources

http://www.dmg.org/v4-0/GeneralStructure.html

http://www.dmg.org/v4-0/Changes.html

and here are some companies using PMML already

http://www.dmg.org/products.html

I found the tool at http://www.dmg.org/coverage/ much more interesting though (see screenshot).

Screenshot-Mozilla Firefox

Zementis who we have covered in the interviews has played a steller role in bring together this common standard for data mining. Note Kxen model is also highlighted there.

The best PMML convertor tutorial is here

http://www.zementis.com/videos/PMML_Converter_iGoogle_gadget_2_demo.htm

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