Case studyAn ML engineer is developing a fraud detection model on AWS.

Problem Description:

The dataset includes multiple data sources:

Transaction logs and customer profiles in Amazon S3.

Tables in an on-premises MySQL database.

There is a class imbalance in the dataset and interdependencies among features that need to be addressed.

The solution requires data aggregation from diverse sources for centralized processing.

Why AWS Lake Formation?

AWS Lake Formation is designed to simplify the process of aggregating, cataloging, and securing data from various sources, including S3, relational databases, and other on-premises systems.

It integrates with AWS Glue for data ingestion and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) workflows, making it a robust choice for aggregating data from Amazon S3 and on-premises MySQL databases.

How It Solves the Problem:

Data Aggregation: Lake Formation collects data from diverse sources, such as S3 and MySQL, and consolidates it into a centralized data lake.

Cataloging and Discovery: Automatically crawls and catalogs the data into a searchable catalog, which the ML engineer can query for analysis or modeling.

Data Transformation: Prepares data using Glue jobs to handle preprocessing tasks such as addressing class imbalance (e.g., oversampling, undersampling) and handling interdependencies among features.

Security and Governance: Offers fine-grained access control, ensuring secure and compliant data management.

Steps to Implement Using AWS Lake Formation:

Step 1: Set up Lake Formation and register data sources, including the S3 bucket and on-premises MySQL database.

Step 2: Use AWS Glue to create ETL jobs to transform and prepare data for the ML pipeline.

Step 3: Query and access the consolidated data lake using services such as Athena or SageMaker for further ML processing.

Why Not Other Options?

Amazon EMR Spark jobs: While EMR can process large-scale data, it is better suited for complex big data analytics tasks and does not inherently support data aggregation across sources like Lake Formation.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: Kinesis is designed for real-time streaming data, not batch data aggregation across diverse sources.

Amazon DynamoDB: DynamoDB is a NoSQL database and is not suitable for aggregating data from multiple sources like S3 and MySQL.

Conclusion: AWS Lake Formation is the most suitable service for aggregating data from S3 and on-premises MySQL databases, preparing the data for downstream ML tasks, and addressing challenges like class imbalance and feature interdependencies.

AWS Lake Formation Documentation

AWS Glue for Data Preparation