SQR-017: Validation Metrics Framework

  • John Parejko and
  • Jonathan Sick

Latest Revision: 2017-03-02

Note

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This technote describes the design of the Metric and Specification system that the new validation framework will use.

1   Frossie’s design principles

  • Metric should be defined independently of code. Client-side code should consume metric definitions., and so will server-side code.
  • Implement as a thin shim over what will become a Butler put.
  • UX for Metric developers: make it as easy as possible for a developer to define a new Metric and Measurements appear in SQUASH and be monitored.

2   The validate_base 2.0 data model

The validation framework provides a rich set of objects for developers to use. The core objects are metrics, specifications, measurements, and monitors. Their relationships are summarized as:

Metrics are measured.
Measurements are tested by specifications.
Specification tests trigger monitors.

The full list of validation framework objects is:

2.1   Afterburner

An afterburner is a piece of code that is executed on the output of a Task in order to calculate a Measurement of a Metric.

2.2   MetricSet

A MetricSet is a collection of Metrics and their associated metadata.

2.2.1   Attributes

  • name - jointcal_cfht_r
  • eups package name of data
  • directory within eups data package for dataset
  • butler dataId or list of dataIds (optional)
  • Metrics (list?)

2.3   Metric

A Metric is a quantity that is measureable.

2.3.1   Prior art

  • lsst.validate.base.Metric
  • Metric.yaml format

2.3.2   Attributes

  • name
  • description
  • unit
  • tags
  • reference.doc
  • reference.page
  • reference.url

2.3.3   Questions & Notes

  • Specifications are no longer contained by Metrics.
  • In the existing lsst.validate.base.Metric, there is a parameters dictionary that defines constants for the Measurement code. For example, the annulus diameter from AMx Metrics. These parameters will be contained in the Specifications.
  • We talked about making the minimum Provenance required for a Measurement/Job being defined in the Metric. Is this still a requirement?

2.4   MeasurementSet

A MeasurementSet is a collection of measurements, and their associated metadata.

2.4.1   Attributes

_ * name — Name of the MetricSet that these Measurements are associated with (e.g. validate_drp) * job_id — Job identifier * provenance — provenance of the executed job (TODO: should this actually live in the job itself?) * measurements — dictionary of name: Measurement.

2.5   Measurement

A Measurement is a realization of a Metric: always a scalar value.

2.5.1   Prior art

  • lsst.validate.base.MeasurementBase

2.5.2   Attributes

  • name — Name of metric that this measured.
  • value — scalar Measurement value, required to be persisted in units of Metric.unit as an astropy.Quantity.

2.5.3   Questions & Notes

  • lsst.validate.base.MeasurementBase originally had a parameters attribute that provided Provenance for how the Measurement was made (e.g., a S/N cut-off for star selection). These will now be part of the Task configuration, and available through the regular Provenance.
  • lsst.validate.base.MeasurementBase also had an extras attribute where additional Measurement outputs could be persisted (JSON serializable). Do we still want this? Or do we always want such data to go into a Blob?

2.6   Blob

A blob is a container for JSON-serializable data that may be associated with one or more Measurements that might be useful for rendering plots and doing SQUASH-side analysis.

2.6.1   Prior art

  • lsst.validate.base.BlobBase

2.7   Job

A Job is an execution of a pipeline, containing Measurements, blobs, and their Provenance.

2.7.1   Prior art

  • lsst.validate.base.Job

2.7.2   Attributes

  • Measurements — list of Measurement objects (TODO: or a MeasurementSet?).
  • blobs — list of Blob objects. Each blob should be reference by at least one * Measurement.
  • Provenance — data structure that fully specifies the Provenance of the pipeline run.

2.7.3   Questions & Notes

  • What is the schema of Provenance? At minimum, it includes the input dataIds (input dataset) and task configurations.
  • Not all Provenance is currently known within the pipeline. We use post-qa to hydrate Job Provenance with package versions and Jenkins environment variables. However, working towards a state where post-qa is no longer used as a shim, it’s not unreasonable to move this into validate_base.

2.8   Provenance

All metadata associated with this Job run, including Config parameters, Butler dataRefs, cluster configuration, etc.

2.8.1   Questions & Notes

  • How is provenance defined?
  • How do we define queries on provenance in a Specification?
  • How do we map between this provenance and the one that DAX will maintain?

2.9   Specification

A Specification is a binary (pass/fail) evaluation of a Measurement of a Metric. There can be an arbitrary number of Specifications associated with a Metric.

2.9.1   Attributes

  • name — Identifier of the Metric that this Specification is attached to.
  • provenance_query — only Measurements that have matching Provenance parameters are tested by this Specification.
  • parameters - A dict of key:value pairs that must be matched by the Job‘s Provenance regarding particular values used in a calculation (e.g. diameter used for aperture photometry).
  • alert_listeners - Slack IDs of people who are alerted if a Measurement fails the Specification.
  • alert_channels - Slack Channel IDs that recieve messages when a Measurement fails a Specification.
  • threshold and comparison_operator — Measurement passes Specification if Measurement is on the side of the threshold indicated by the comparison operator.
  • rangeMeasurement passes Specification if Measurement is within this range (new).

2.9.2   Questions & Notes

  • Either threshold or range can be set. Possibly there should be different classes of Specification (i.e., a ThresholdSpecification or a RangeSpecification).
  • Note that we’re jettisoning some of the earlier Specification class baggage, like dependencies. This means that the definitions of Metrics are no longer driven by definitions of Specifications, as they currently are for AFx/ADx, for example. Instead, this flexibility is handled by additional Metrics.
  • Should the Parameters just be part of the Provenance, or should they be a separate section for maintanence convinience and get ingested into the Provenance?

2.10   MeasurementView

A MeasurementView is a collection of Measurements for a Metric, possibly filtered by Provenance. A MeasurementView can be used to populate a Measurement timeseries (regression plot), as seen in SQUASH. A MeasurementView is essentially a DB query, but provides a more concrete API for us to think about how we can do data science against Measurements.

2.10.1   Attributes

  • Metric_name
  • Provenance_query

3   validate_metrics: A package for metric and specification definitions

All packages that make metric measurements define those metrics as YAML files in the validate_metrics package. Likewise, all specifications for these metrics are also centrally defined in YAML files committed to validate_metrics. This design is appealing because SQUASH infrastructure can watch the validate_metrics repository and populate its DB from validate_metrics as a single source of truth. validate_metrics effectively becomes a user interface for package developers and test engineers to configure the testing system.

validate_metrics is designed to be a data-only package (though it still provides a version in Python, lsst.validate.metrics.__version__) validate_base provides Python access to metrics and specifications.

Within validate_metrics, developers work in two directories:

  • /metrics hosts metric definition YAML files. For each Stack package that generates metric measurements there is a metric definition file named after that package. For example:

    metrics/
      validate_drp.yaml
      jointcal.yaml
    

    The format of these YAML files is described below. We expect these metric definitions to be slow moving, and only change when a new metric measurement is coded into a Stack package.

  • /specs hosts specification definition. These YAML files are organized into sub-directories named after the metric YAML file, but otherwise the names of specification YAML files has no programmatic meaning. For example:

    specs/
      validate_drp/
        LPM-17.yaml
        cfht_gri.yaml
    

    In this example, official specifications defined in LPM-17, the Science Requirements Document, are coded in LPM-17.yaml. This specification file would remain static, while developers would typically add custom, ad-hoc, specifications in other files, like cfht_gri.yaml. The format of specification YAML files is described below.

3.1   Metric YAML format

This is an example of a PA1 metric encoded in validate_metrics/metrics/validate_drp.yaml:

PA1:
  description: >
    The maximum rms of the unresolved source magnitude distribution around the mean value.
  unit: mmag
  reference:
    doc: LPM-17
    url: http://ls.st/lpm-17
    page: 21

The root level of a metric YAML file is an associative array (equivalent to a Python dict) where keys are metric names. In the above example, only PA is shown, but it might be followed by other metrics like PF1 and PA2.

A metric definition itself is minimal, consisting of only three fields:

  • description: a sentence, or even multiple paragraphs, that describe the metric. This description is consumed by the Science Pipelines documentation, and also shown by SQUASH.
  • unit: the string representation of the astropy.units.Unit that measurements of a metric are made in. Unitless metrics (a count, for example), have units written as an empty string ''. Percentages can be written as %. Fractions are not supported by astropy.unit so fractional metrics must be rephrased as percentages.
  • reference: this field points to further documentation where a metric is formally defined. Provide doc, url, and page fields as appropriate.

3.1.1   Fully qualified metric name

Metrics can be referenced universally by their fully qualified name:

{ package name }.{ metric name }

For example, the fully qualified name for the example metric is validate_drp.PA1.

When working inside a package, where context is clear, the validate API can permit metrics to be addressed by name alone, PA1.

3.2   Specification YAML format

A complete specification looks like:

---
metric: 'PA1'
name: 'design_gri'
threshold:
  value: 5.0
  unit: '%'
  operator: '<='
provenance_query:
  filter: ['g', 'r', 'I']
...

Notice that each specification is encapsulated within a corresponding YAML document (which are divided by --- tokens). There is always one specification per YAML document. This architecture allows us to spread specifications across many YAML files in the validate_metrics repository, and permit specifications to reference each other (see partials and inheritance, below).

The fields of a specification are:

  • metric: the name of the metric this specification applies to. Since specifications are encapsulated by package, there is no need to use the fully-qualified metric name.

  • name: the name of this metric.

    Specifications extend the naming system of metrics. The fully qualified name of this specification is validate_drp.PA1.design_gri (assuming the specification is defined in /specs/validate_drp/).

  • threshold: this is a test against a measurement. A measurement passes a specification test if this statement evaluates to true:

    { measurement value } { operator } { threshold value }
    

    Other test formats are available for specifications. See below.

  • provenance_query field is an associative array (dictionary) of query terms for measurement provenance that this specification can be applied to. The query language is currently undefined, so the example is a pseudocode query where the filter must be one of g, r or i.

3.2.1   Specification tests

The binary comparison test is quite common, but its not the only imaginable test structure. Other types of tests that may be supported by the validation framework are:

  • tolerance: consisting of a target value, and a symmetric tolerance window.
  • window: test if a measurement deviates from the sample of previous measurements in a given window, by a given amount.
  • function: specifies an importable Python function that computes a binary True (pass) or False (fails) result.

3.2.2   Specification partials

Specifications might repeat information. For example, a provenance_query for a certain test dataset. We apply DRY design principles though partials. A partial has an id field, and can’t be a specification on its own. For example:

---
# specification partial
id: 'base'
metric: 'PA1'
threshold:
  unit: ''
  operator: '<='
provenance_query:
  filter: ['g', 'r', 'I']

---
# design specification instance that mixes in the base partial
# validate_drp.PA1.design
name: 'design'
base: '#base'
threshold:
  value: 5.0

---
# stretch specification instance that mixes in the base partial
# validate_drp.PA1.stretch
name: 'stretch'
base: '#base'
threshold:
  value: 3.0
...

A partial can be referenced from the base field by prefixing the id with #. Partials can also be referenced from across files (but within the same package’s specs directory) by providing a filename:

base: "cfht_gri#base"

3.2.3   Specification inheritance

Specifications can also inherit from specifications; generally to add partials. Specifications are referenced through their fully qualified name validate_drp.PA1.design_gri, or the package-relative fully qualified name, PA1.design_gri. For example:

---
# Specification partial
id: 'PA1-base'
metric: 'PA1'
threshold:
  unit: 'mmag'
  operator: "<="

---
# validate_drp.PA1.minimum_gri
name: "minimum_gri"
base: "#PA1-base"
threshold:
  value: 8.0

---
# Partial that queries a cfht_gri dataset
id: 'cfht-base'
provenance_query:
  dataset_repo_url: 'https://github.com/lsst/validation_data_cfht.git'
  filters: ['g', 'r', 'i']
  visits: [849375, 850587]
  ccd: [12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23]

---
# validate_drp.PA1.cfht_minimum_gri
name: 'cfht_minimum_gri'
base: ['PA1.minimum_gri', '#cfht-base']
...

The fully-hydrated validate_drp.PA1.minimum_gri specification is:

---
name: 'minimum_gri'
metric: 'PA1'
threshold:
  value: 8.0
  unit: 'mmag'
  operator: "<="

And the fully-hydrated validate_drp.PA1.cfht_minimum_gri specification is:

name: 'cfht_minimum_gri'
metric: 'PA1'
provenance_query:
  dataset_repo_url: 'https://github.com/lsst/validation_data_cfht.git'
  filters: ['g', 'r', 'i']
  visits: [849375, 850587]
  ccd: [12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23]
threshold:
  value: 8.0
  unit: 'mmag'
  operator: "<="

4   How Measurements are submitted to SQUASH

4.1   Design Principles

  • Think about Airplane Mode.
  • Think about how this will eventually be a Butler.put().

4.2   Proposal

Packages construct a Job that contains Measurements, blobs and Provenance. This Job, serialized to JSON, is sent over the logger. A special Metric logger is used that saves this log statement to a separate file. A next-generation post-qa sends this Job to SQUASH’s REST API.

  • Bonus: Packages could provide Jupyter Notebooks that locally consume the log data to show plots and pass/fail Specification status.
  • Bonus: make validate_base capable of generating the Jupyter Notebook!
  • Bonus: share Bokeh plots between notebooks and SQUASH.

5   How Specifications are registered

5.1   Design principles

  • Specifications are a mechanism for LSST staff to monitor a MeasurementView and be alerted whenever a new Measurement exceeds a threshold or range.
  • It needs to be easy for any LSST staff member to register a new Specification; they should not be required to contact SQuaRE to register or change a Specification.
  • Specifications should be available offline, but be synced to SQUASH.

5.2   Proposal

There is a common EUPS package that contains Specifications in a YAML format. These Specifications are available, through a Python API, to packages so that they can show real-time pass/fail status of Measurements. The Specifications are also synchronized with the SQUASH database. If someone wants to be alerted by a Specification, they sign themselves up as an owner of the Specification.