An Exploratory Study on Machine Learning Model Management

Abstract

Effective model management is crucial for ensuring performance and reliability in Machine Learning (ML) systems, given the dynamic nature of data and operational environments. However, standard practices are lacking, often resulting in ad hoc approaches. To address this, our research provides a clear definition of ML model management activities, processes, and techniques. Analyzing 227 ML repositories, we propose a taxonomy of 16 model management activities and identify 12 unique challenges. We find that 57.9% of the identified activities belong to the maintenance category, with activities like refactoring (20.5%) and documentation (18.3%) dominating. Our findings also reveal significant challenges in documentation maintenance (15.3%) and bug management (14.9%), emphasizing the need for robust versioning tools and practices in the ML pipeline. Additionally, we conducted a survey that underscores a shift towards automation, particularly in data, model, and documentation versioning, as key to managing ML models effectively. Our contributions include a detailed taxonomy of model management activities, a mapping of challenges to these activities, practitioner-informed solutions for challenge mitigation, and a publicly available dataset of model management activities and challenges. This work aims to equip ML developers with knowledge and best practices essential for the robust management of ML models.