solution for large amount of time series data with many attributes - nlp

I am working on a news analytics project, we retrieve events from real time news streams and do sentiment for certain financial instruments. Currently we only generate one time series sentiment stream per instrument, which is aggregated from over 100 types of events and many news website.We use Postgres to store the structured data, pre-calculate/aggregate sentiment and store on Influx to support real time streaming on frontend.
We are thinking of expanding the functionality to let user to be able to select the in scope event types and news sources, so every user can have different sentiment streams. And user should be able to further break down sentiment with only certain event type or source. The ideal solution should be able to let user to define the scope and receive aggregated sentiment on the fly.
I hardly imagine aggregation can be done completely on the fly without any pre-calculation. On the other hand, the most atomic time series is per event type per news source. But in this way we need to maintain (100event types * 100 news source * 1000 instruments) 10million series? Increasing news source further will make the system impossible to maintain.
Can someone please share some thoughts what architecture or technical solution may support our requirements?

If all event types and sources share same instruments, then you can create a one stream and make event type and source a attribute in the stream ( series). Then you can filter the stream by attributes as needed.
However, if different sources have different instruments and event types, then you can have a stream ( time series) for instrument and add source and event type as attributes to each stream so you can filter by attributes.
In general, try to reduce number of streams and encode that information as attributes.

Related

How do I find out right data design and right tools/database/query for below requirement

I have a kind of requirement but not able to figure out how can I solve it. I have datasets in below format
id, atime, grade
123, time1, A
241, time2, B
123, time3, C
or if I put in list format:
[[123,time1,A],[124,timeb,C],[123,timec,C],[143,timed,D],[423,timee,P].......]
Now my use-case is to perform comparison, aggregation and queries over multiple row like
time difference between last 2 rows where id=123
time difference between last 2 rows where id=123&GradeA
Time difference between first, 3rd, 5th and latest one
all data (or last 10 records for particular id) should be easily accessible.
Also need to further do compute. What format should I chose for dataset
and what database/tools should I use?
I don't Relational Database is useful here. I am not able to solve it with Solr/Elastic if you have any ideas, please give a brief.Or any other tool Spark, hadoop, cassandra any heads?
I am trying out things but any help is appreciated.
Choosing the right technology is highly dependent on things related to your SLA. things like how much can your query have latency? what are your query types? is your data categorized as big data or not? Is data updateable? Do we expect late events? Do we need historical data in the future or we can use techniques like rollup? and things like that. To clarify my answer, probably by using window functions you can solve your problems. For example, you can store your data on any of the tools you mentioned and by using the Presto SQL engine you can query and get your desired result. But not all of them are optimal. Furthermore, usually, these kinds of problems can not be solved with a single tool. A set of tools can cover all requirements.
tl;dr. In the below text we don't find a solution. It introduces a way to think about data modeling and choosing tools.
Let me take try to model the problem to choose a single tool. I assume your data is not updatable, you need a low latency response time, we don't expect any late event and we face a large volume data stream that must be saved as raw data.
Based on the first and second requirements, it's crucial to have random access (it seems you wanna query on a particular ID), so solutions like parquet or ORC files are not a good choice.
Based on the last requirement, data must be partitioned based on the ID. Both the first and second requirements and the last requirement, count on ID as an identifier part and it seems there is nothing like join and global ordering based on other fields like time. So we can choose ID as the partitioner (physical or logical) and atime as the cluster part; For each ID, events are ordered based on the time.
The third requirement is a bit vague. You wanna result on all data? or for each ID?
For computing the first three conditions, we need a tool that supports window functions.
Based on the mentioned notes, it seems we should choose a tool that has good support for random access queries. Tools like Cassandra, Postgres, Druid, MongoDB, and ElasticSearch are things that currently I can remember them. Let's check them:
Cassandra: It's great on response time on random access queries, can handle a huge amount of data easily, and does not have a single point of failure. But sadly it does not support window functions. Also, you should carefully design your data model and it seems it's not a good tool that we can choose (because of future need for raw data). We can bypass some of these limitations by using Spark alongside Cassandra, but for now, we prefer to avoid adding a new tool to our stack.
Postgres: It's great on random access queries and indexed columns. It supports window functions. We can shard data (horizontal partitioning) across multiple servers (and by choosing ID as the shard key, we can have data locality on computations). But there is a problem: ID is not unique; so we can not choose ID as the primary key and we face some problems with random access (We can choose the ID and atime columns (as a timestamp column) as a compound primary key, but it does not save us).
Druid: It's a great OLAP tool. Based on the storing manner (segment files) that Druid follows, by choosing the right data model, you can have analytic queries on a huge volume of data in sub-seconds. It does not support window functions, but with rollup and some other functions (like EARLIEST), we can answer our questions. But by using rollup, we lose raw data and we need them.
MongoDB: It supports random access queries and sharding. Also, we can have some type of window function on its computing framework and we can define some sort of pipelines for doing aggregations. It supports capped collections and we can use it to store the last 10 events for each ID if the cardinality of the ID column is not high. It seems this tool can cover all of our requirements.
ElasticSearch: It's great on random access, maybe the greatest. With some kind of filter aggregations, we can have a type of window function. It can handle a large amount of data with sharding. But its query language is hard. I can imagine we can answer the first and second questions with ES, but for now, I can't make a query in my mind. It takes time to find the right solution with it.
So it seems MongoDB and ElasticSearch can answer our requirements, but there is a lot of 'if's on the way. I think we can't find a straightforward solution with a single tool. Maybe we should choose multiple tools and use techniques like duplicating data to find an optimal solution.

Using single Time Series per Device containing multiple sensors in Azure Timeseries Insights

We are using Azure TimeSeries Insights to store time series from various sensors from our devices.
In order to faciliate querying of multiple related sensors at once i only use the deviceId (from IoT Hub) as a TimeSeries Id.
This works for my backend queries and i can use the filter expression to filter by sensor id.
The only downside i discovered was that i am losing support for TSI Explorer because my value property in a time series contains values from multiple sensors. Display as a single graph makes no sense.
I thought maybe i can use the TSI Model to create fields which filter by sensor id so i get the same experience in TSI Explorer as if i would use a time series per device and sensor. But i didn't figure out how to do so.
So my questions are:
Does the approach of merging multiple sensors of a device in a single time series have any downsides (besides the apparently lost TSI Explorer support) ?
Is there a way to model the Time Series to get back TSI Explorer support back again?
#Markus, I am sure adding variable with a filter expression like "$event.sensorId.String = ''", will allow plotting time series on TSI explorer. However this would have a serious performance implications; especially when you have a large number of time series instances.
The most preferred method is to model each sensor (using composite TSID) as a time series and build hierarchy model to organize/contextualize data such that sensors are listed under a device as a parent in TSI explorer.
From TSI team, we would like to better understand your use case. If I may suggest something, please raise a support ticket in Azure portal with necessary contact details. we can get in touch to understand your use case here and better assist you in attaining your objective.

Building a collaborative filtering recommendation engine using Spark mlLib

I am trying to build a recommendation engine based on collaborative filtering using apache Spark. I have been able to run the recommendation_example.py on my data, with quite good result. (MSE ~ 0.9). Some of the specific questions that I have are:
How to make recommendation for the users who have not done any activity on the site. Isn't there some API call for popular items, which would give me the most popular items based on user actions. One way to do is to identify the popular items by ourselves, and catch the java.util.NoSuchElementException exception, and return those popular items.
How to reload the model, after some data has been added in the input file. I am trying to reload the model using another function, which tries to save the model, but it gives error as org.apache.hadoop.mapred.FileAlreadyExistsException. One way to do is to listen for the incoming data on a parallel thread, save it using model.save(sc, "target/tmp/<some target>") and then reload the model after significant data has been received. I am lost here, how to achieve that.
It would be very helpful, if I could get some direction here.
For the first part, you can find item_id, Number of times that item_id appeared. You can use map and reduceByKey functions of spark for that. After that find the top 10/20 items having max count. You can also give the weightage depending on recency of the items.
For the second part, you can save the model with new name every time. I generally create a folder name on the go using the current date and time and use the same name to reload the model from the saved folder. You will always have to train the model again, using past data and the new data received and then use the model to predict.
Independent of using platforms like Spark, there are some very good techniques(for ex. non-negative matrix factorization) of link prediction which predicts link between 2 sets.
Other very effective(and good) techniques of recommendations are:-
1. Thompson Sampling, 2.MAB (Multi Arm Bandits). A lot depends on the raw dataset. How is your raw dataset distributed. I would recommend to apply above methods on 5% raw dataset, build a hypothesis, use A/B testing, predicts links and move forward.
Again, all these techniques are independent of platform. I would also recommend of moving from scratch instead of using platforms like spark which are only useful for large datasets. You can always move to these platforms in future for scalability.
Hope it helps!

Real time multi threaded max-heap for top-N geohash

There is a requirement to keep a list of top-10 localities in a city from where demand for our food service is emanating at any given instant. The city could have tens of thousands of localities.
If one has to make a near real time (lag no more than 5 minutes) datastore in memory that would
- keep count of incoming demand by locality (geo hash)
- reads by hundreds of our suppliers every minute (the ajax refresh is every minute)
I was thinking of a multi threaded synchronized max-heap. This would be a complex solution as tree locking is by itself a complex implementation.
Any recommendations for the best in-memory (replicatable master slave) data structure that can be read and updated in multi threaded environment?
We expect 10K QPS and 100K updates per second. When we scale to other cities and regions, we will need per city implementation of top-10.
Are there any off the shelf solutions available?
Persistence is not a need so no mySQL based solutions. If you recommend redis or mongo DB solution, please realize that the queries are not pointed-queries by key but a top-N query instead.
Thanks in advance.
If you're looking for exactly what you're describing, there are a few approaches that might work nicely. There are several papers describing concurrent data structures that could work as priority queues; here is one option that I'm not super familiar with but which looks promising. You might also want to check out concurrent skip lists, which should also match your requirements.
If I'm interpreting your problem statement correctly, you're hoping to maintain a top-10 list of locations based on the number of hits you receive. If that's the case, I would suspect that while the number of updates would be huge, the number of times that two locations would switch positions would not actually be all that large. In other words, most updates wouldn't actually require the data structure to change shape. Consequently, you could consider using a standard binary heap where each element uses an atomic-compare-and-set integer key and where you have some kind of locking system that's used only in the case where you need to add, move, or delete an element from the heap.
Given the scale that you're working at, you may also want to consider approximate solutions to your problem. The count-min sketch data structure, for example, was specifically designed to estimate frequent elements in a data stream and does so extremely quickly. It can easily be distributed and linked up with a priority queue in a manner similar to what I described above. There are lots of good implementations out there, and if I remember correctly this data structure is actually deployed in situations like the one you're describing.
Hope this helps!

DDD/CQRS Querying Events

I was looking at post's on querying in application designed with approach Event Sourcing/DDD/CQRS.
As I understand events are changes to the state of a domain object. The changes to state will be maintained as history/events in DB(any of sql/no sql).
If user wants to query to get current state for a particular aggregate root, it will involve fetching history of events.
When user will query especially business specific queries he/she will be interested in current state not the history of events.
How querying or 'Q' part in CQRS works with event sourcing?
Consider I have a domain object "Account" as aggregate root. The account AR will go through lots of changes i.e. credits debits. event store will have credit and debit events.
Consider user is required to get current balance of an account, how stream of history of events will suite here? How will user fetch current balance for given account?
I am unable to understand, How for business specific querying history of events will be useful?
-Prakhyat M M
I would recommend you to read more articles from Greg Young (He is like the father of CQRS and Event Sourcing), like this: CQRS, Task Based UIs, Event Sourcing... agh.
Sorry for my bad English, I am from Paraguay. But I really like DDD - CQRS - ES and I would like to try to make a point.
The use of "Projections" (also known as Materialized Views) and the concept of "Eventual Consistency" are the fundamentals that every practitioner of CQRS should understand very well. The Event Store is for query. Is in the Command side of CQRS, not the in the Query side. You may use a bus to send the events stored in the Event Store to the query side in order to process and generate a read model, or view models, from which you can query. In any case a eventstore per se is a query model.
Looks like you are a Java guy, but, still, you may want to check the CQRS Journey from Microsoft.
Hope this helps a little bit and motivates you to do more research on DDD / CQRS / ES, the New Trio of Line of Business Applications.
You'll use a projection of the event stream into the read model, that contains exactly those information that the Query-side (Q) needs. For example, you could have an "account balance" projection that follows all events that change the account balance, but possibly ignores other events in the account's stream (such as owner changes). The projection then saves that info in a way that it can be queried very quickly, e.g., in memory or in a small read-model database table (accountId, balance) with the accountId as the key (database can be a key-value store, for example).
I suggest further reading on the CQRS concept such as this one or this one.
Interesting enough, recently more people discover using event store as the read model, leaving projections and "proper" read models until absolutely necessary.
We all know that dealing with projections increases the complexity. At minimum you have to create new models, establish the DAL for the read model and create projections to translate event to the read model changes, and bind those projections to the stream of events from your store. It requires more code, more moving parts and some of them are not easy to test. Schema changes at the read side also require migrations.
It appears that for many scenarios reading all events (properly partitioned) might be enough to have your "read model". It takes not much time until the system really grows large so you need to read tens of thousands of events to create one UI screen. But before you reach this point, you can just read events. May be use the file system to store events although tools like EventStore are free and quite easy to use. May be add some indexing.
This approach let you stabilise the domain significantly, you get more knowledge about how the system works, tune the events and be really prepared to bring the "proper" read model into the system, but you might not have to.
Adam Dymitruk has wrote a blog post about it, you might find it worth reading even if you don't want to take this approach. Greg Young also gave a talk EventStore as read model back in 2012.

Resources