In the rapidly evolving landscape of data science and machine learning, data versioning has become a crucial practice. As datasets grow in size and complexity, keeping track of changes, ensuring reproducibility, and maintaining data integrity are essential tasks. This article delves into the concept of data versioning, its importance, use cases, and applications, focusing on how it can be efficiently managed using Python.

What is Data Versioning?

Data versioning is the process of tracking and managing changes to datasets over time, similar to how version control systems manage source code. It involves creating snapshots of datasets at different points, including metadata like timestamps and change logs, to maintain a historical record and allow users to revert, compare, and understand data evolution.

Applications of Data Versioning

• Model Training and Evaluation: Facilitates the training and evaluation of machine learning models by keeping track of the data used, enabling comparison of model performance over different dataset versions.
• Data Pipeline Management: Manages dependencies and ensures consistency across different stages of data pipelines by using specific dataset versions for each stage.
• Error Recovery: Enables quick recovery from errors by reverting to previous versions of datasets, minimizing downtime and impact.
• Experimentation and Tuning: Supports iterative experimentation by allowing data scientists to test different versions of datasets and fine-tune models accordingly.

Why is Data Versioning Necessary?

Reproducibility: Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific research and data analysis. Data versioning ensures that datasets used in experiments, analyses, or machine learning models can be precisely replicated. By maintaining versions of datasets, researchers can trace back to the exact data that produced specific results, enabling others to validate findings and build upon previous work.

• Collaboration: Data versioning facilitates seamless collaboration among team members. Multiple data scientists, analysts, and engineers often work on the same projects. With data versioning, teams can manage and track changes to datasets collaboratively, avoiding conflicts and ensuring everyone works with the most up-to-date data.
• Managing Data Pipelines: In complex data pipelines, different stages may require different versions of datasets. Data versioning allows for the precise management of these dependencies, ensuring that each stage of the pipeline has access to the correct data version, thereby maintaining the integrity of the entire process.

Let’s Get Started

Prerequisites

• Python : 3.9 or 3.10
• Google Drive Account
• Git installed
• GitHub Account

Pushing Data from local to remote

Open your terminal and Type

pip install dvc

To initialize git and dvc respectively

git init

dvc init

you must have folder for keeping all data used for project let’s consider that you have folder named data

data is folder containing all data required by project

To add data files to DVC system. here .file is extension of file

dvc add <path/to/data.file>

As soon as you type above command. the .dvc files is added to repository.

git add <path/to/data.file>.dvc <path\to\data\folder>\.gitignore

This command will stage the progress into git.

Now to push data into our own seperate remote storage also known as DVC Remote.

We need to setup an remote origin for dvc same as the one we use for git.

How to find your key

Note : The key must be kept secret.

To add DVC remote. run below with given syntax. named as origin

dvc remote add --default < origin> gdrive://<Key of Folder in Gdrive where you want to store>

This syntax is useful only for google drive storage. You other kinds of storage you can check reference below

After you successfully add setup remote run below command as it is.

git commit .dvc\config -m "Configured Remote"

Next step is to push data into remote. So, to complete authentication with google drive. install following dependency.

pip install dvc_gdrive

Then to push data run following command

dvc push

If you are pushing for first time it will prompt you to authentication by google in your default browser. From make sure to choose the same account from which folder is created.

After authentication data must be pushed. you can cross check this by seeing inside the google drive folder.

Pulling / Cloning Data from remote to local

Now, That suppose you want to clone it into new project named Data Versioning Clone

To initialize git and dvc respectively

git init

dvc init

To pull data from git repository named project where data is folder containing Data files we need. run following. -o is flag denoting where to store data on local repository after pulling.

dvc get [email protected]:username/project.git  data/da.txt -o data/