Pronounced surplus as it's simply better if not best!
Simple Algorithm for Recommendation (SAR) is a neighborhood based algorithm for personalized recommendations based on user transaction history. SAR recommends items that are most similar to the ones that the user already has an existing affinity for. Two items are similar if the users that interacted with one item are also likely to have interacted with the other. A user has an affinity to an item if they have interacted with it in the past.
SARplus is an efficient implementation of this algorithm for Spark.
Features:
- Scalable PySpark based implementation
- Fast C++ based predictions
- Reduced memory consumption: similarity matrix cached in-memory once per worker, shared across python executors
# Users | # Items | # Ratings | Runtime | Environment | Dataset |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2.5mio | 35k | 100mio | 1.3h | Databricks, 8 workers, Azure Standard DS3 v2 (4 core machines) |
There are a couple of key optimizations:
- map item ids (e.g. strings) to a continuous set of indexes to optimize storage and simplify access
- convert similarity matrix to exactly the representation the C++ component needs, thus enabling simple shared, memory mapping of the cache file and avoid parsing. This requires a customer formatter, written in Scala
- shared read-only memory mapping allows us to re-use the same memory from multiple python executors on the same worker node
- partition the input test users and past seen items by users, allowing for scale out
- perform as much of the work as possible in PySpark (way simpler)
- top-k computation
- reverse the join by summing reverse joining the users past seen items with any related items
- make sure to always just keep top-k items in-memory
- use standard join using binary search between users past seen items and the related items
Two packages should be installed:
- pysarplus@PyPI
- sarplus@MavenCentralRepository (or sarplus-spark-3-2-plus@MavenCentralRepository if run on Spark 3.2+)
from pysarplus import SARPlus
# spark dataframe with user/item/rating/optional timestamp tuples
train_df = spark.createDataFrame(
[(1, 1, 1), (1, 2, 1), (2, 1, 1), (3, 1, 1), (3, 3, 1)],
["user_id", "item_id", "rating"]
)
# spark dataframe with user/item tuples
test_df = spark.createDataFrame(
[(1, 1, 1), (3, 3, 1)],
["user_id", "item_id", "rating"],
)
# To use C++ based fast prediction, a local cache directory needs to be
# specified.
# * On local machine, `cache_path` can be any valid directories. For example,
#
# ```python
# model = SARPlus(
# spark,
# col_user="user_id",
# col_item="item_id",
# col_rating="rating",
# col_timestamp="timestamp",
# similarity_type="jaccard",
# cache_path="cache",
# )
# ```
#
# * On Databricks, `cache_path` needs to be mounted on DBFS. For example,
#
# ```python
# model = SARPlus(
# spark,
# col_user="user_id",
# col_item="item_id",
# col_rating="rating",
# col_timestamp="timestamp",
# similarity_type="jaccard",
# cache_path="dbfs:/mnt/sarpluscache/cache",
# )
# ```
#
# * On Azure Synapse, `cache_path` needs to be mounted on Spark pool's driver
# node. For example,
#
# ```python
# model = SARPlus(
# spark,
# col_user="user_id",
# col_item="item_id",
# col_rating="rating",
# col_timestamp="timestamp",
# similarity_type="jaccard",
# cache_path=f"synfs:/{job_id}/mnt/sarpluscache/cache",
# )
# ```
#
# where `job_id` can be obtained by
#
# ```python
# from notebookutils import mssparkutils
# job_id = mssparkutils.env.getJobId()
# ```
model = SARPlus(
spark,
col_user="user_id",
col_item="item_id",
col_rating="rating",
col_timestamp="timestamp",
similarity_type="jaccard",
)
model.fit(train_df)
# To use C++ based fast prediction, the `use_cache` parameter of
# `SARPlus.recommend_k_items()` also needs to be set to `True`.
#
# ```
# model.recommend_k_items(test_df, top_k=3, use_cache=True).show()
# ```
model.recommend_k_items(test_df, top_k=3, remove_seen=False).show()
Insert this cell prior to the code above.
import os
SARPLUS_MVN_COORDINATE = "com.microsoft.sarplus:sarplus_2.12:0.6.6"
SUBMIT_ARGS = f"--packages {SARPLUS_MVN_COORDINATE} pyspark-shell"
os.environ["PYSPARK_SUBMIT_ARGS"] = SUBMIT_ARGS
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
spark = (
SparkSession.builder.appName("sample")
.master("local[*]")
.config("memory", "1G")
.config("spark.sql.shuffle.partitions", "1")
.config("spark.sql.crossJoin.enabled", True)
.config("spark.sql.sources.default", "parquet")
.config("spark.sql.legacy.createHiveTableByDefault", True)
.config("spark.ui.enabled", False)
.getOrCreate()
)
SARPLUS_MVN_COORDINATE="com.microsoft.sarplus:sarplus_2.12:0.6.6"
# Install pysarplus
pip install pysarplus
# Specify sarplus maven coordinate and configure Spark environment
pyspark --packages "${SARPLUS_MVN_COORDINATE}" \
--conf spark.sql.crossJoin.enabled=true \
--conf spark.sql.sources.default=parquet \
--conf spark.sql.legacy.createHiveTableByDefault=true
- Navigate to your Databricks Workspace
- Create Library
- Under
Library Source
selectMaven
- Enter into
Coordinates
:com.microsoft.sarplus:sarplus_2.12:0.6.6
- or
com.microsoft.sarplus:sarplus-spark-3-2-plus_2.12:0.6.6
(if you're on Spark 3.2+)
- Hit
Create
- Attach to your cluster
- Create 2nd library
- Under
Library Source
selectPyPI
- Enter
pysarplus==0.6.6
- Hit
Create
This will install C++, Python and Scala code on your cluster. See Libraries for details on how to install libraries on Azure Databricks.
-
Navigate to your Databricks Compute
-
Navigate to your cluster's
Configuration
->Advanced options
->Spark
-
Put the following configurations into
Spark config
spark.sql.crossJoin.enabled true spark.sql.sources.default parquet spark.sql.legacy.createHiveTableByDefault true
These will set the crossJoin property to enable calculation of the similarity matrix, and set default sources to parquet.
It can also be configured by putting the following Python code in a notebook cell:
spark.conf.set("spark.sql.crossJoin.enabled", "true")
spark.conf.set("spark.sql.sources.default", "parquet")
spark.conf.set("spark.sql.legacy.createHiveTableByDefault", "true")
To use C++ based fast prediction in
pysarplus.SARPlus.recommend_k_items()
, a local cache directory needs
to be specified as the cache_path
parameter of pysarplus.SARPlus()
to store intermediate files during its calculation, so you'll also
have to mount shared storage.
For example, you can create a storage
account
(e.g. sarplusstorage
) and a container (e.g. sarpluscache
) in the
storage account, copy the access key of the storage account, and then
run the following code to mount the storage.
dbutils.fs.mount(
source = "wasbs://<container>@<storage-account>.blob.core.windows.net",
mount_point = "/mnt/<container>",
extra_configs = {
"fs.azure.account.key.<storage-account>.blob.core.windows.net":
"<access-key>"
}
)
where <storage-account>
, <container>
and <access-key>
should be
replaced with the actual values, such as sarplusstorage
,
sarpluscache
and the access key of the storage account. Then pass
cache_path="dbfs:/mnt/<container>/cache"
to pysarplus.SARPlus()
,
where cache
is the cache's name.
To disable logging messages:
import logging
logging.getLogger("py4j").setLevel(logging.ERROR)
-
Download pysarplus WHL file from pysarplus@PyPI
-
Download sarplus JAR file from sarplus@MavenCentralRepository
(or sarplus-spark-3-2-plus@MavenCentralRepository if run on Spark 3.2+)
-
Navigate to your Azure Synapse workspace ->
Manage
->Workspace packages
-
Upload pysarplus WHL file and sarplus JAR file as workspace packages
-
Navigate to your Azure Synapse workspace ->
Manage
->Apache Spark pools
-
Find the Spark pool to install the packages ->
...
->Packages
->Workspace packages
->+ Select from workspace packages
and select pysarplus TAR file and sarplus JAR file uploaded in the previous step -
Apply
pysarplus can also be installed via requirements.txt
. See Manage
libraries for Apache Spark in Azure Synapse
Analytics
for details on how to manage libraries in Azure Synapse.
To use C++ based fast prediction in
pysarplus.SARPlus.recommend_k_items()
, a local cache directory needs
to be specified as the cache_path
parameter of pysarplus.SARPlus()
to store intermediate files during its calculation, so you'll also
have to mount shared storage.
For example, you can run the following code to mount the file system (container) of the default/primary storage account.
from notebookutils import mssparkutils
mssparkutils.fs.mount(
"abfss://<container>@<storage-account>.dfs.core.windows.net",
"/mnt/<container>",
{ "linkedService": "<storage-linked-service>"}
)
job_id = mssparkutils.env.getJobId()
Then pass cache_path=f"synfs:/{job_id}/mnt/<container>/cache"
to
pysarplus.SARPlus()
, where cache
is the cache's name. NOTE:
job_id
should be prepended to the local path.
See How to use file mount/unmount API in Synapse for more details.
See DEVELOPMENT.md for implementation details and development information.