Snowflake Exam DSA-C02 Topic 1 Question 18 Discussion

Model versioning in a way involves tracking the changes made to an ML model that has been previously built. Put differently, it is the process of making changes to the configurations of an ML Model. From another perspective, we can see model versioning as a feature that helps Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists, and related personnel create and keep multiple versions of the same model.

Think of it as a way of taking notes of the changes you make to the model through tweaking hyperparameters, retraining the model with more data, and so on.

In model versioning, a number of things need to be versioned, to help us keep track of important changes. I'll list and explain them below:

Implementation code: From the early days of model building to optimization stages, code or in this case source code of the model plays an important role. This code experiences significant changes during optimization stages which can easily be lost if not tracked properly. Because of this, code is one of the things that are taken into consideration during the model versioning process.

Data: In some cases, training data does improve significantly from its initial state during model op-timization phases. This can be as a result of engineering new features from existing ones to train our model on. Also there is metadata (data about your training data and model) to consider versioning. Metadata can change different times over without the training data actually changing. We need to be able to track these changes through versioning

Model: The model is a product of the two previous entities and as stated in their explanations, an ML model changes at different points of the optimization phases through hyperparameter setting, model artifacts and learning coefficients. Versioning helps take record of the different versions of a Machine Learning model.

MLFlow & Pachyderm are the tools used to manage ML lifecycle & Model versioning.