Pylint VS MLflow

A little introduction about pylint. Pylint is a static code analyzer, it analyses your code without actually running it. Pylint looks for potential errors, gives suggestions on coding standards that your code is not adhering to, potential places where refactoring might help, and also warnings about smelly code.

Pylint, on the other hand, focuses on code analysis and style checking. It offers extensive customization options and supports various coding standards. Pylint is known for its comprehensive reports and ability to detect a wide range of code issues.

In my opinion, the best way to expose configuration options is to read and parse them from the project's pyproject.toml file. Here's how Pylint handles it.

I even contributed to Pylint by submitting a new rule a few years ago : implicit-str-concat.

Implemented code formatting with Black and linting with Pylint in my CI pipeline. Here is my updated GitHub Actions Workflow file: ci.yml

One last thing to do before running the hooks is to create a config file, just like we did with flake8. For this you are going to create a pylintrc file at the roor of your project and copy the contents of the pylintrc file from the pylint repo (here is the link to it).

How can this be? The current state of practice in AI/ML work requires adaptivity, which is uncommon in classical computational fields. There are myriad tools that capture the work across the many instances of the AI/ML lifecycle. The idea that any one tool could sufficiently capture the dynamic work is unrealistic. Take, for example, an experiment tracking tool like W&B or MLFlow; some form of experiment tracking is necessary in typical model training lifecycles. Such a tool requires some notion of a dataset. However, a tool focusing on experiment tracking is orthogonal to the needs of analyzing model performance at the data sample level, which is critical to understanding the failure modes of models. The way one does this depends on the type of data and the AI/ML task at hand. In other words, MLOps is inherently an intricate mosaic, as the capabilities and best practices of AI/ML work evolve.

MLflow is an open-source platform for managing the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle. It includes features for experiment tracking, model versioning, and deployment, enabling developers to track and compare experiments, package models into reproducible runs, and manage model deployment across multiple environments.

Platforms such as MLflow monitor the development stages of machine learning models. In parallel, Data Version Control (DVC) brings version control system-like functions to the realm of data sets and models.

MLFlow - http://mlflow.org

MLflow:

In search for a tool that needs comparable configuration I looked into mlflow and found this. https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow/blob/master/mlflow/environment_variables.py There they define a class _EnvironmentVariable and create many objects out of it, for any variable they need. The get method of this class is in principle a decorated os.getenv. Maybe that is something I can take as orientation.

I have been using DVC and MLflow since then DVC had only data tracking and MLflow only model tracking. I can say both are awesome now and maybe the only factor I would like to mention is that IMO, MLflow is a bit harder to learn while DVC is just a git practically.