Towards robust production machine learning systems

Abstract

The advances in machine learning (ML) have stimulated the integration of their capabilities into software systems. However, there is a tangible gap between software engineering and machine learning practices, that is delaying the progress of intelligent services development. Software organisations are devoting effort to adjust the software engineering processes and practices to facilitate the integration of machine learning models. Machine learning researchers as well are focusing on improving the interpretability of machine learning models to support overall system robustness. Our research focuses on bridging this gap through a methodology that evaluates the robustness of machine learning-enabled software engineering systems. In particular, this methodology will automate the evaluation of the robustness properties of software systems against dataset shift problems in ML. It will also feature a notification mechanism that facilitates the debugging of ML components.