Active Learning - Using DataRobot without using DataRobot

With 2 children under 10 in my house, my most commonly used phrase is "you've left the lights on" (in whichever room they have most recently exited).

It seems the apple has not fallen far from the tree, as I recently committed the same "sin" with some AWS services I am running... I am terrible at checking my bank statement, i recently saw my monthly AWS bill of ~$100. This was significantly more than I am used to. Then it struck me... I have been getting charged this for the last 6 months because of a solution I developed, forgot about, and left it "on". Hence this post....

To rub salt into the wound, the ex-customer I was working on this for decided to not renew their license - making my hundreds of development hours of effort wasted...

• Losing a customer,
• Spending hundreds of hours of my personal time
• Spending lots of my personal money on AWS with no one seeing any value

What a waste.... but this is where you come in internet friends...

TLDR: Create an account and try out the website/app I made https://app.stayclassy.site

About 6 months ago, I noticed one of my customers wasn't really using DataRobot, and after some questioning, the problem was a lack of availability of training data.

They had a good use case, but the inertia of the way they currently do things (manually) - even though they didn't enjoy it - was a big barrier. The basic idea was to design an "active learning" app powered by DataRobot, but without needing to log into DataRobot. Summarised below in the diagram:

The business users felt the DataRobot UI was a little intimidating for their very specific use case, and the initial feedback of this web UI was positive, but unfortunately budget cuts and changing priorities meant that this solution never really had the chance to prove if it was useful or not for this customer.

I spent some time making it generic enough to make it useful for any binary classification use case - not just theirs. (Note: multi class would also be relatively trivial to cater for, so please hit me up if this is something you want to see and if I have time I will add the functionality). Also you can still use this website if you're not a DataRobot customer, but you will only be able to get your training dataset generated (rather than training an ML model and having the rest of your data classified by DataRobot).

Create an account and try it out https://app.stayclassy.site

Please let me know what you think - this website is my own creation and treat it as VERY much an "alpha" version, it was a great learning experience to construct a flask application from scratch to cater for multiple users and logins and also do the more interesting ML stuff too, and making it available to the www.

For those who are interested, it uses a variety of technologies: Python, Flask, Jinja, Docker, Postgres SQL all hosted on Amazon Web Services - Elastic Container Service, Elastic Load Balancing, Lambda, Route 53, EC2, S3 (shout out to AWS, their infra services are really great)