Predict from stdin or via the programmatic api

As soon as my brand new model is ready, I would like ludwig the enable predictions via the command line, so that one could do like

echo "call me at [phone] for offers" | ludwig predict --only_prediction --model_path /path/to/model -

where the - may indicate the stdin (as an example) and get the model predictions directly. This would help to integrated ludwing command in a inference pipeline.

If I have understood well the api (my model is not ready yet…) it should be possibile via the programmatic api like that:

from ludwig import LudwigModel

# load a model
model = LudwigModel.load(model_path)

# obtain predictions
myDict = { 'text': ['call me at [phone] for offers'] }
predictions = model.predict(data_dict=myDict,
  return_type=dict
  batch_size=128,
  gpus=None,
  gpu_fraction=1,
  logging_level=logging.DEBUG)

# close model (eventually)
model.close()

Is that correct?

[w4nderlust]

I added it to the list of enhancements! Stay tuned.

[w4nderlust]

Got it, that seems like a great idea. What i was planning to have a ludwig serve command that would start a REST server, maybe I can either create another one or put an option if to start the server or if to listen to stdin. The reason for not using predict for this purpose is because it will be nice to expose also model.train() and model.train_online() and basically any other function of the API. The only difficulty that I can imagine being there with the stdin reading is that the input should be in kind of a tabular encoding, because methods need to know which feature the value belongs to, so for instance your example should be stdin.write(text: call me at [phone] for offers, other_feature: other_value\r\n). Plus more than one sample may be passed at the same time, which means that probably you want to encode it in something like JSON: stdin.write({"text": ["call me at [phone] for offers", "text_2"], "other_feature": [other_value_1, other_value_2]}). I think that would work, what do you think? Maybe JSON will make escaping characters a bit of mess…