MLife: A Lite Framework for Machine Learning Lifecycle Initialization

Machine learning (ML) lifecycle is a cyclic process to build an efficient ML system. Though a lot of commercial and community (non-commercial) frameworks have been proposed to streamline the major stages in the ML lifecycle, they are normally overqualified and insufficient for an ML system in its nascent phase. Driven by real-world experience in building and maintaining ML systems, we find that it is more efficient to initialize the major stages of ML lifecycle first for trial and error, followed by the extension of specific stages to acclimatize towards more complex scenarios. For this, we introduce a simple yet flexible framework, MLife, for fast ML lifecycle initialization. This is built on the fact that data flow in MLife is in a closed loop driven by bad cases, especially those which impact ML model performance the most but also provide the most value for further ML model development—a key factor towards enabling enterprises to fast track their ML capabilities. Better yet, MLife is also flexible enough to be easily extensible to more complex scenarios for future maintenance. For this, we introduce two real-world use cases to demonstrate that MLife is particularly suitable for ML systems in their early phases.