Raven: End-to-end Optimization of ML Prediction Queries

Machine learning (ML) models are typically part of prediction queries that consist of a data processing part (e.g., for joining, filtering, cleaning, featurization) and an ML part invoking one or more trained models. In this presentation, we identify significant and unexplored opportunities for optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to look at prediction queries holistically, optimizing across both the ML and SQL components. We will present Raven, an end-to-end optimizer for prediction queries. Raven relies on a unified intermediate representation that captures both data processing and ML operators in a single graph structure. This allows us to introduce optimization rules that (i) reduce unnecessary computations by passing information between the data processing and ML operators (ii) leverage operator transformations (e.g., turning a decision tree to a SQL expression or an equivalent neural network) to map operators to the right execution engine, and (iii) integrate compiler t