Title: Machine Learning through Database Glasses

Abstract:

As we witness the data science revolution, each research community legitimately reflects on its relevance and place in this new landscape. The database research community has at least three reasons to feel empowered by this revolution. This has to do with the pervasiveness of relational data in data science, the widespread need for efficient data processing, and the new processing challenges posed by data science workloads beyond the classical database workloads. The first two aforementioned reasons are widely acknowledged as core to the community's raison d'être. The third reason explains the longevity of relational database management systems success: Whenever a new promising data-centric technology surfaces, research is under way to show that it can be captured naturally by variations or extensions of the existing relational techniques.

In this talk, I will make the case for a first-principles approach to machine learning over relational databases that guided our recent work and can dramatically improve the runtime performance of machine learning. This approach exploits the algebraic and combinatorial structure of relational data processing. It also relies on compilation for hybrid database and learning workloads and on computation sharing across aggregates in learning-specific batches.

This work is the outcome of extensive collaboration of the author with colleagues from RelationalAI (https://www.relational.ai), in particular Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Molham Aref, Hung Ngo, and XuanLong Nguyen, and from the FDB research project (https://fdbresearch.github.io/), in particular Ahmet Kara, Milos Nikolic, Maximilian Schleich, Amir Shaikhha, and Haozhe Zhang.