Integrated solutions for analytics over relational databases are of great
practical importance as they avoid the costly repeated loop data scientists
have to deal with on a daily basis: select features from data residing in
relational databases using feature extraction queries involving joins,
projections, and aggregations; export the training dataset defined by such
queries; convert this dataset into the format of an external learning tool; and
train the desired model using this tool. These integrated solutions are also a
fertile ground of theoretically fundamental and challenging problems at the
intersection of relational and statistical data models.
This article introduces a unified framework for training and evaluating a
class of statistical learning models over relational databases. This class
includes ridge linear regression, polynomial regression, factorization
machines, and principal component analysis. We show that, by synergizing key
tools from database theory such as schema information, query structure,
functional dependencies, recent advances in query evaluation algorithms, and
from linear algebra such as tensor and matrix operations, one can formulate
relational analytics problems and design efficient (query and data)
structure-aware algorithms to solve them.
This theoretical development informed the design and implementation of the
AC/DC system for structure-aware learning. We benchmark the performance of
AC/DC against R, MADlib, libFM, and TensorFlow. For typical retail forecasting
and advertisement planning applications, AC/DC can learn polynomial regression
models and factorization machines with at least the same accuracy as its
competitors and up to three orders of magnitude faster than its competitors
whenever they do not run out of memory, exceed 24-hour timeout, or encounter
internal design limitations.Comment: 61 pages, 9 figures, 2 table
