What this book covers
Chapter 1, Machine Learning Compared to Traditional Software, explores where these two types of software systems are most appropriate. We learn about the software development processes that programmers use to create both types of software and we also learn about the classical four types of machine learning software – rule-based, supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Finally, we also learn about the different roles of data in traditional and machine learning software.
Chapter 2, Elements of a Machine Learning System, reviews each element of a professional machine learning system. We start by understanding which elements are important and why. Then, we explore how to create such elements and how to work by putting them together into a single machine learning system – the so-called machine learning pipeline.
Chapter 3, Data in Software Systems – Text, Images, Code, and Features, introduces three data types – images, texts, and formatted text (program source code). We explore how each of these types of data can be used in machine learning, how they should be annotated, and for what purpose. Introducing these three types of data provides us with the possibility to explore different ways of annotating these sources of data.
Chapter 4, Data Acquisition, Data Quality, and Noise, dives deeper into topics related to data quality. We go through a theoretical model for assessing data quality and we provide methods and tools to operationalize it. We also look into the concept of noise in machine learning and how to reduce it by using different tokenization methods.
Chapter 5, Quantifying and Improving Data Properties, dives deeper into the properties of data and how to improve them. In contrast to the previous chapter, we work on feature vectors rather than raw data. The feature vectors are already a transformation of the data; therefore, we can change such properties as noise or even change how the data is perceived. We focus on the processing of text, which is an important part of many machine learning algorithms nowadays. We start by understanding how to transform data into feature vectors using simple algorithms, such as bag of words, so that we can work on feature vectors.
Chapter 6, Processing Data in Machine Learning Systems, dives deeper into the ways in which data and algorithms are entangled. We talk a lot about data in generic terms, but in this chapter, we explain what kind of data is needed in machine learning systems. We explain the fact that all kinds of data are used in numerical form – either as a feature vector or as more complex feature matrices. Then, we will explain the need to transform unstructured data (e.g., text) into structured data. This chapter will lay the foundations for going deeper into each type of data, which is the content of the next few chapters.
Chapter 7, Feature Engineering for Numerical and Image Data, focuses on the feature engineering process for numerical and image data. We start by going through the typical methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which we used previously for visualization. We then move on to more advanced methods such as the t-Student Distribution Stochastic Network Embeddings (t-SNE) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). What we end up with is the use of autoencoders as a dimensionality reduction technique for both numerical and image data.
Chapter 8, Feature Engineering for Natural Language Data, explores the first steps that made the transformer (GPT) technologies so powerful – feature extraction from natural language data. Natural language is a special kind of data source in software engineering. With the introduction of GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT, it became evident that machine learning and artificial intelligence tools for software engineering tasks are no longer science fiction.
Chapter 9, Types of Machine Learning Systems – Feature-Based and Raw Data-Based (Deep Learning), explores different types of machine learning systems. We start from classical machine learning models such as random forest and we move on to convolutional and GPT models, which are called deep learning models. Their name comes from the fact that they use raw data as input and the first layers of the models include feature extraction layers. They are also designed to progressively learn more abstract features as the input data moves through these models. This chapter demonstrates each of these types of models and progresses from classical machine learning to the generative AI models.
Chapter 10, Training and Evaluation of Classical ML Systems and Neural Networks, goes a bit deeper into the process of training and evaluation. We start with the basic theory behind different algorithms and then we show how they are trained. We start with the classical machine learning models, exemplified by the decision trees. Then, we gradually move toward deep learning where we explore both the dense neural networks and some more advanced types of networks.
Chapter 11, Training and Evaluation of Advanced ML Algorithms – GPT and Autoencoders, explores how generative AI models work based on GPT and Bidirectional Encoder Representation Transformers (BERT). These models are designed to generate new data based on the patterns that they were trained on. We also look at the concept of autoencoders, where we train an autoencoder to generate new images based on the previously trained data.
Chapter 12, Designing Machine Learning Pipelines and their Testing, describes how the main goal of MLOps is to bridge the gap between data science and operations teams, fostering collaboration and ensuring that machine learning projects can be effectively and reliably deployed at scale. MLOps helps to automate and optimize the entire machine learning life cycle, from model development to deployment and maintenance, thus improving the efficiency and effectiveness of ML systems in production. In this chapter, we learn how machine learning systems are designed and operated in practice. The chapter shows how pipelines are turned into a software system, with a focus on testing ML pipelines and their deployment at Hugging Face.
Chapter 13, Designing and Implementation of Large-Scale, Robust ML Software, explains how to integrate the machine learning model with a graphical user interface programmed in Gradio and storage in a database. We use two examples of machine learning pipelines – an example of the model for predicting defects from our previous chapters and a generative AI model to create pictures from a natural language prompt.
Chapter 14, Ethics in Data Acquisition and Management, starts by exploring a few examples of unethical systems that show bias, such as credit ranking systems that penalize certain minorities. We also explain the problems with using open source data and revealing the identities of subjects. The core of the chapter, however, is the explanation and discussion on ethical frameworks for data management and software systems, including the IEEE and ACM codes of conduct.
Chapter 15, Ethics in Machine Learning Systems, focuses on the bias in machine learning systems. We start by exploring sources of bias and briefly discussing these sources. We then explore ways to spot biases, how to minimize them, and finally, how to communicate potential biases to the users of our system.
Chapter 16, Integration of ML Systems in Ecosystems, explains how packaging the ML systems into web services allows us to integrate them into workflows in a very flexible way. Instead of compiling or using dynamically linked libraries, we can deploy machine learning components that communicate over HTTP protocols using JSON protocols. In fact, we have already seen how to use that protocol by using the GPT-3 model that is hosted by OpenAI. In this chapter, we explore the possibility of creating our own Docker container with a pre-trained machine learning model, deploying it, and integrating it with other components.
Chapter 17, Summary and Where to Go Next, revisits all the best practices and summarizes them per chapter. In addition, we also look into what the future of machine learning and AI may bring to software engineering.
