Machine Learning is a tool that is helping developers and data scientists to accomplish all sorts of tasks:

  • Classification – organize and tag data

  • Regression – find relationships between data points

  • Forecasting – use current data to predict the future

  • Anomaly detection – find unusual data points

In this post, I’m going to show you how you can combine the web-based REST API that Nexosis provides for machine learning with Couchbase Server.

The first place to go when trying out machine learning is often Kaggle. Kaggle provides a wide variety of data sets perfect for machine learning applications. I’ve decided to use the Amazon Reviews for Sentiment Analysis data set (I have truncated it and slightly modified it for this post).

The data in this set contains the text of a review left on Amazon and a label of either “__label__1” or “__label__2”. The former means it was a negative review (1 or 2 stars) and the latter means it was a positive review (4 or 5 stars). Score 3 is consider neutral and is not included in this training set, but I’m going to explore that a little later.

My goal is to give Nexosis an Amazon review that is not in the training set, and have Nexosis classify it as “__label__1” or “__label__2” for me. This type of classification is also known as sentiment analysis. This can be useful for early warning of negative customer experience, for instance.

Create your Nexosis machine learning account

I found it very easy to get started with Nexosis. The community edition of Nexosis is free. Once you log in, visit your profile page and make note of your API key (you’ll need it for every API request you make).

Nexosis machine learning API key

From this point on, when making an HTTP request to Nexosis, you will need to include that key in your header as api-key.

Setting up machine learning

The first step to setup Nexosis is to give it a data set. I’m using the data set I got from Kaggle. The data is a two column CSV file. To get this data to Nexosis, you can make a request like so (using a tool like Postman, for instance):

Don’t forget the api-key in the header!

The response from this request, if successful, should look similar to this:

This import may take a little time. You can make a GET request to https://ml.nexosis.com/v1/imports to check to see that your request went through. You’ll see this data set as one of the “items”.

Creating a Nexosis session

The next step is to create a Nexosis session. This will start Nexosis training on the data that you already imported. Here’s a sample POST to start a session:

Some notes on what this all means:

  • "predictionDomain":"classification" – Remember when I said I was going to use “classification” for sentiment analysis?

  • "dataSourceName" : "AmazonReviews" – I gave the data source this name, so I’m telling it to use this data source for training.

  • "targetColumn": "review_sentiment" – The ‘review_sentiment’ column contains the “__label__1” or “__label__2” values. This is the value that I want Nexosis to learn how to generate.

  • "extraParameters" : { "balance": true } – If your data set is unbalanced (meaning, for instance, it contains a lot more negative reviews than positive ones), that could disproportionally influence the machine learning. Set balance to “true” to adjust for this.

The response from that request will look something like this:

Note that this type of session will take some time to produce. You will get an email notification from Nexosis when the session is ready. You can also check the “results” (see the above URL) from time to time.

Completed model

Once the session is completed, you will get a modelId in the results, that will be another GUID. You will need this to proceed.

Once you receive the modelId, you can check to see how accurate the model is. Make a GET to https://ml.nexosis.com/v1/sessions/< guid >/results and look at the metrics field. The results for mine looks like:

This will let you know how reliable the model is. If it’s not high enough for whatever threshold you decide you need, you may want to try adjusting your model
for better accuracy. You can consider adding/removing fields from the training set until you meet the necessary threshold.

It’s still not going to be perfect, so if this analysis is going to be used for something high-impact and crucial, you may want to involve a human in some part of the process.

81% accuracy is enough for me to proceed.

Test out the machine learning model

Let’s test the model out with REST. I’ll be making a POST request to the /predict url using the modelId like:

POST https://ml.nexosis.com/v1/models/<model ID guid>/predict

The body of this request will contain the Amazon review that I want to get Nexosis’s opinion on. I’ll give it the text of a 1-star review.

When submitting that, Nexosis will think about it and return a result like this:

This means two things:

  1. The model is working okay!

  2. The review I just sent is likely a negative review. Reading it myself, I would have to agree.

Using Nexosis in Couchbase

Instead of creating these POST requests by hand, we can use Nexosis directly in Couchbase.

Note: Nexosis doesn’t require Couchbase and vice versa. Nexosis simply exposes a JSON REST API and Couchbase is able to use it. They work well together because they both follow common web standards.

To use Nexosis in Couchbase, simply make CURL requests to the Nexosis API from a Couchbase N1QL query.

Allowing CURL in Couchbase

First, you need to setup couchbase to allow it to make CURL requests. Allowing any arbitrary CURL request would be a security risk, so you’ll need to opt-in to allowing certain requests. You do this by creating (or updating) a curl_whitelist.json file. Check out CURL Comes to N1QL for more details.

Here is the curl_whitelist.json I’m using. On Windows, this file goes in the C:\Program Files\Couchbase\Server\var\lib\couchbase\n1qlcerts folder.

Creating a N1QL query

N1QL is Couchbase’s SQL implementation used to query JSON. Ultimately, you may want Nexosis to feed into UPDATE or INSERT commands. But for this post, I’m just going to use a SELECT.

In Couchbase, I’ve created a bucket with some reviews I pulled manually from Amazon. (I also executed CREATE PRIMARY INDEX on reviews).

Reviews in Couchbase bucket

These were not part of the training data, so Nexosis will be giving a positive or negative sentiment score on its own.

Let’s start with a simple SELECT and build from there.

First simple query

Using CURL to bring in Machine Learning

Next, I’ll bring in CURL. I’m using LET to make the query more readable.

Notice that the body is pulling the text directly from the review document in Couchbase. The only thing I’ve selected (so far) is the entire response from Nexosis, which looks similar to this:

Query 2

I could further drill into the results from Nexosis, and put it side by side with the actual score from Amazon to see how Nexosis did. Here’s the query:

And here’s the results (I truncated the full text):

Results

As you might expect, Nexosis took the 1-star review from Amazon and rightly discerned that it was a negative review (classified it as “__label__1”).

It also took the 5-star review and rightly discerned that it was a positive review (classified it as “__label__2”).

I also decided to give it a 3-star “neutral” review. Note that the training set had none of these, so this may not be valid, but I was curious. It classified it as a negative review. Just based on the language alone this is probably accurate. This might actually be a helpful tool to look at ostensibly “neutral” reviews and discern if they are leaning one way or the other.

Summary

Anytime you use CURL in N1QL, be careful. When you use CURL, you are putting your query at the mercy of an HTTP request to a 3rd party. You may want to run these in the background as a batch process to UPDATE and INSERT instead of a live SELECT like I’m doing.

But if you CURL wisely, you can use a 3rd party tool like Nexosis to peform machine learning, categorization, sentiment analysis, and more. Nexosis happened to make it very easy for me to get started and very easy to use with a standard CURL command.

If you are interested in Nexosis, check out the Nexosis Use Cases page to see how Nexosis can help you or your business. If you have questions about using Nexosis, check out the Nexosis Forums.

Have a question about Couchbase? Check out the Couchbase forums, and check out the N1QL Forum if you have a question about the queries you see in this post.

Have a question for me? I’m on Twitter @mgroves.

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Posted by Madhuram Gupta

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