MLOps Spanning Whole Machine Learning Life Cycle: A Survey

Google AlphaGos win has significantly motivated and sped up machine learning (ML) research and development, which led to tremendous ML technical advances and wider adoptions in various domains (e.g., Finance, Health, Defense, and Education). These advances have resulted in numerous new concepts and technologies, which are too many for people to catch up to and even make them confused, especially for newcomers to the ML area. This paper is aimed to present a clear picture of the state-of-the-art of the existing ML technologies with a comprehensive survey. We lay out this survey by viewing ML as a MLOps (ML Operations) process, where the key concepts and activities are collected and elaborated with representative works and surveys. We hope that this paper can serve as a quick reference manual (a survey of surveys) for newcomers (e.g., researchers, practitioners) of ML to get an overview of the MLOps process, as well as a good understanding of the key technologies used in each step of the ML process, and know where to find more details.

Global-Local Metamodel Assisted Two-Stage Optimization via Simulation

To integrate strategic, tactical and operational decisions, the two-stage optimization has been widely used to guide dynamic decision making. In this paper, we study the two-stage stochastic programming for complex systems with unknown response estimated by simulation. We introduce the global-local metamodel assisted two-stage optimization via simulation that can efficiently employ the simulation resource to iteratively solve for the optimal first- and second-stage decisions. Specifically, at each visited first-stage decision, we develop a local metamodel to simultaneously solve a set of scenario-based second-stage optimization problems, which also allows us to estimate the optimality gap. Then, we construct a global metamodel accounting for the errors induced by: (1) using a finite number of scenarios to approximate the expected future cost occurring in the planning horizon, (2) second-stage optimality gap, and (3) finite visited first-stage decisions. Assisted by the global-local metamodel, we propose a new simulation optimization approach that can efficiently and iteratively search for the optimal first- and second-stage decisions. Our framework can guarantee the convergence of optimal solution for the discrete two-stage optimization with unknown objective, and the empirical study indicates that it achieves substantial efficiency and accuracy.