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NVTabular demo on Rossmann data - Feature Engineering & Preprocessing

Overview

NVTabular is a feature engineering and preprocessing library for tabular data designed to quickly and easily manipulate terabyte scale datasets used to train deep learning based recommender systems. It provides a high level abstraction to simplify code and accelerates computation on the GPU using the RAPIDS cuDF library.

Learning objectives

This notebook demonstrates the steps for carrying out data preprocessing, transformation and loading with NVTabular on the Kaggle Rossmann dataset. Rossmann operates over 3,000 drug stores in 7 European countries. Historical sales data for 1,115 Rossmann stores are provided. The task is to forecast the “Sales” column for the test set.

The following example will illustrate how to use NVTabular to preprocess and feature engineer the data for further training deep learning models. We provide notebooks for training neural networks in TensorFlow, PyTorch and FastAI. We’ll use a dataset built by FastAI for solving the Kaggle Rossmann Store Sales competition. Some cuDF preprocessing is required to build the appropriate feature set, so make sure to run 01-Download-Convert.ipynb first before going through this notebook.

import os
import json
import nvtabular as nvt

from nvtabular import ops

Preparing our dataset

Let’s start by defining some of the a priori information about our data, including its schema (what columns to use and what sorts of variables they represent), as well as the location of the files corresponding to some particular sampling from this schema. Note that throughout, I’ll use UPPERCASE variables to represent this sort of a priori information that you might usually encode using commandline arguments or config files.

We use the data schema to define our pipeline.

DATA_DIR = os.environ.get(
    "OUTPUT_DATA_DIR", os.path.expanduser("~/nvt-examples/data/")
)

CATEGORICAL_COLUMNS = [
    "Store",
    "DayOfWeek",
    "Year",
    "Month",
    "Day",
    "StateHoliday",
    "CompetitionMonthsOpen",
    "Promo2Weeks",
    "StoreType",
    "Assortment",
    "PromoInterval",
    "CompetitionOpenSinceYear",
    "Promo2SinceYear",
    "State",
    "Week",
    "Events",
    "Promo_fw",
    "Promo_bw",
    "StateHoliday_fw",
    "StateHoliday_bw",
    "SchoolHoliday_fw",
    "SchoolHoliday_bw",
]

CONTINUOUS_COLUMNS = [
    "CompetitionDistance",
    "Max_TemperatureC",
    "Mean_TemperatureC",
    "Min_TemperatureC",
    "Max_Humidity",
    "Mean_Humidity",
    "Min_Humidity",
    "Max_Wind_SpeedKm_h",
    "Mean_Wind_SpeedKm_h",
    "CloudCover",
    "trend",
    "trend_DE",
    "AfterStateHoliday",
    "BeforeStateHoliday",
    "Promo",
    "SchoolHoliday",
]
LABEL_COLUMNS = ["Sales"]

COLUMNS = CATEGORICAL_COLUMNS + CONTINUOUS_COLUMNS + LABEL_COLUMNS

What files are available to train on in our data directory?

! ls $DATA_DIR

output.csv		  test.csv			    valid.csv
ross_pre		  test_inference_rossmann_data.csv  workflow
rossmann_predictions.csv  train.csv

train.csv and valid.csv seem like good candidates, let’s use those.

TRAIN_PATH = os.path.join(DATA_DIR, "train.csv")
VALID_PATH = os.path.join(DATA_DIR, "valid.csv")

Defining our Data Pipeline

The first step is to define the feature engineering and preprocessing pipeline.

NVTabular has already implemented multiple calculations, called ops. An op can be applied to a ColumnGroup from an overloaded >> operator, which in turn returns a new ColumnGroup. A ColumnGroup is a list of column names as text.

Example:
features = [<column name>, …] >> <op1> >> <op2> >> …

This may sounds more complicated as it is. Let’s define our first pipeline for the Rossmann dataset.

We need to categorify the categorical input features. This converts the categorical values of a feature into continuous integers (0, …, |C|), which is required by an embedding layer of a neural network.

• Initial ColumnGroup is CATEGORICAL_COLUMNS

• Op is Categorify

cat_features = CATEGORICAL_COLUMNS >> ops.Categorify()

We can visualize the calculation with graphviz.

(cat_features).graph

Our next step is to process the continuous columns. We want to fill in missing values and normalize the continuous features with mean=0 and std=1.

• Initial ColumnGroup is CONTINUOUS_COLUMNS

• First Op is FillMissing

• Second Op is Normalize

cont_features = CONTINUOUS_COLUMNS >> ops.FillMissing() >> ops.Normalize()

(cont_features).graph

Finally, we need to apply the LogOp to the label/target column.

label_feature = LABEL_COLUMNS >> ops.LogOp()

(label_feature).graph

We can visualize the full workflow by concatenating the output ColumnGroups.

(cat_features + cont_features + label_feature).graph

Workflow

A NVTabular workflow orchastrates the pipelines. We initialize the NVTabular workflow with the output ColumnGroups.

proc = nvt.Workflow(cat_features + cont_features + label_feature)

Datasets

In general, the Ops in our Workflow will require measurements of statistical properties of our data in order to be leveraged. For example, the Normalize op requires measurements of the dataset mean and standard deviation, and the Categorify op requires an accounting of all the categories a particular feature can manifest. However, we frequently need to measure these properties across datasets which are too large to fit into GPU memory (or CPU memory for that matter) at once.

NVTabular solves this by providing the Dataset class, which breaks a set of parquet or csv files into into a collection of cudf.DataFrame chunks that can fit in device memory. Under the hood, the data decomposition corresponds to the construction of a dask_cudf.DataFrame object. By representing our dataset as a lazily-evaluated Dask collection, we can handle the calculation of complex global statistics (and later, can also iterate over the partitions while feeding data into a neural network).

train_dataset = nvt.Dataset(TRAIN_PATH)
valid_dataset = nvt.Dataset(VALID_PATH)

PREPROCESS_DIR = os.path.join(DATA_DIR, "ross_pre/")
PREPROCESS_DIR_TRAIN = os.path.join(PREPROCESS_DIR, "train")
PREPROCESS_DIR_VALID = os.path.join(PREPROCESS_DIR, "valid")

! rm -rf $PREPROCESS_DIR # remove previous trials
! mkdir -p $PREPROCESS_DIR_TRAIN
! mkdir -p $PREPROCESS_DIR_VALID

Now that we have our datasets, we’ll apply our Workflow to them and save the results out to parquet files for fast reading at train time. Similar to the scikit learn API, we collect the statistics of our train dataset with .fit.

proc.fit(train_dataset)

We apply and transform our dataset with .transform and persist it to disk with .to_parquet. We want to shuffle our train dataset before storing to disk to provide more randomness during our deep learning training.

proc.transform(train_dataset).to_parquet(PREPROCESS_DIR_TRAIN, shuffle=nvt.io.Shuffle.PER_WORKER)
proc.transform(valid_dataset).to_parquet(PREPROCESS_DIR_VALID, shuffle=None)

Then, we save the workflow to be used by the Triton export functions for inference.

proc.save(os.path.join(DATA_DIR, "workflow"))

Finalize embedding tables

In the next steps, we will train a deep learning model with either TensorFlow, PyTorch or FastAI. Our training pipeline requires information about the data schema to define the neural network architecture. In addition, we store the embedding tables structure.

EMBEDDING_TABLE_SHAPES = nvt.ops.get_embedding_sizes(proc)
EMBEDDING_TABLE_SHAPES

{'Assortment': (4, 16),
 'CompetitionMonthsOpen': (26, 16),
 'CompetitionOpenSinceYear': (24, 16),
 'Day': (32, 16),
 'DayOfWeek': (8, 16),
 'Events': (22, 16),
 'Month': (13, 16),
 'Promo2SinceYear': (9, 16),
 'Promo2Weeks': (27, 16),
 'PromoInterval': (4, 16),
 'Promo_bw': (9, 16),
 'Promo_fw': (9, 16),
 'SchoolHoliday_bw': (9, 16),
 'SchoolHoliday_fw': (9, 16),
 'State': (13, 16),
 'StateHoliday': (3, 16),
 'StateHoliday_bw': (6, 16),
 'StateHoliday_fw': (6, 16),
 'Store': (1116, 81),
 'StoreType': (5, 16),
 'Week': (53, 16),
 'Year': (4, 16)}

json.dump(
    {
        "EMBEDDING_TABLE_SHAPES": EMBEDDING_TABLE_SHAPES,
        "CATEGORICAL_COLUMNS": CATEGORICAL_COLUMNS,
        "CONTINUOUS_COLUMNS": CONTINUOUS_COLUMNS,
        "LABEL_COLUMNS": LABEL_COLUMNS,
    },
    open(PREPROCESS_DIR + "/stats.json", "w"),
)

!ls $PREPROCESS_DIR

stats.json  train  valid