Source – https://www.idevnews.com/

Iguazio is adding a production-ready feature store to its data science platform.  It will allow users to more quickly and easily develop, deploy and manage AI apps, according to execs.

Iguazio is adding a production-ready feature store to its data science platform. The offering aims to bring off-the-shelf technology to the growing area of data science while also significantly reduce the skills barrier. 

Ignazio’s integrated feature store is designed to lower the skills required to work on AI applications, so that even firms without professional data scientists can participate.

In specific, Iguazio’s approach lets users catalog, store and share features centrally, making it easier for teams to collaborate on development, deployment and management of AI apps – even across hybrid, cloud and multi-cloud environments, according to Asaf Somekh, Iguazio Co-Founder and CEO.  

“For companies that don’t have hundreds of data scientists and data engineers, building a feature store from scratch, in-house, is not feasible,” Somekh said, adding “We wanted to bring this functionality to our customers, and provide them with an off-the-shelf solution for feature engineering across training, serving and monitoring in hybrid environments.”

Architecturally, Iguazio’s feature store is built on its open source MLOps framework, MLRun, enabling contributors to add data sources and contribute additional functionality.

Iguazio’s feature store offers a “unified” approach, as it is integrated within its data science platform. This unique design means It plugs seamlessly into the data ingestion, model training, model serving, and model monitoring components. This reduces significant development and operations overhead while also boosting performance, Somekh added. 

Iguazio provides “next-level automation of model monitoring and drift detection,” Somekh added, to support model training at scale and to run continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of machine learning (ML), he added.

Also notable, Iguazio’s “unified” feature store is available online and offline. 

In a recent post which also appeared on Medium, Ignazio’s VP Product Adi Hirschtein explained the need for a modern “unified” feature store:

In detail, Iguazio’s integrated feature store provides users these important advantages:

Ability To Build Features Once and Plug Them Anywhere, Seamlessly:  Because the Iguazio feature store is a centralized and versioned catalog, everyone can engineer and store features (along with metadata and statistics), as well as share and reuse them, and analyze impacts on existing models. Users can collect many independent features into vectors and use those from their jobs or real-time services. Iguazio’s high-performance engines automatically join and accurately compute all features.

Real-Time Features and Drift Detection: Iguazio can detect model drift and inaccuracies automatically. Upon such discoveries, Iguazio can alert the users or initiate automated re-training workflows.

Robust Data Transformation: Users can create complex feature engineering processes with Iguazio’s built-in robust data transformation service. This service includes feature aggregations with sliding windows, dozens of pre-built transformations, or support for custom logic in native Python code. With a simple API and SDK, data scientists can easily create features without requiring long data engineering cycles.

Feature Catalog: To let users share, search and collaborate on features, evaluate features with detailed statistics and analysis, and see how features correlate to both data sources and models with an easy-to-use user interface.

Integrated Data and Model Monitoring: Iguazio captures the feature statistics in real-time, enabling drift detection based on actual data drift. Thanks to the Iguazio feature store’s integration, capabilities such as concept drift monitoring and feature monitoring are available out-of-the-box.

Real-Time Feature Engineering:  Users develop features once. The feature transformation pipeline calculates features in real-time based on incoming events or streams and serves the results at millisecond-level latency or pushes them directly into a stream.

Data Governance: With strict governance, Iguazio users can also keep the data lineage of a feature, with the tracking information capturing how the feature was generated, critical for regulatory compliance.

Iguazio customers include Payoneer, Quadient, and Tulipan for various use cases such as fraud prediction and real-time recommendations.