Deploy a machine learning model using flask

As a beginner in machine learning, it might be easy for anyone to get enough resources about all the algorithms for machine learning and deep learning but when I started to look for references to deploy ML model to production I did not find really any good resources which could help me to deploy my model as I am very new to this field. So, when I succeeded to deploy my model using Flask as an API, I decided to write an article to help others to simply deploy their model. I hope it helps:)

In this article, we are going to use simple linear regression algorithm with scikit-learn for simplicity, we will use Flask as it is a very light web framework. We will create three files,

1. model.py
2. server.py
3. request.py

In a model.py file, we will develop and train our model, in a server.py, we will code to handle POST requests and return the results and finally in the request.py, we will send requests with the features to the server and receive the results.

Let’s begin the coding part

1. model.py

As I mentioned above, in this file we will develop our ML model and train it. We will predict the salary of an employee based on his/her experience in the field. You can find the dataset here.

import numpy as npimport pandas as pdfrom sklearn.model_selection import train_test_splitfrom sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegressionimport pickleimport requestsimport json

Importing the libraries that we are going to use to develop our model. numpy and pandas to manipulate the matrices and data respectively, sklearn.model_selection for splitting data into train and test set and sklearn.linear_model to train our model using LinearRegression. pickle to save our trained model to the disk, requests to send requests to the server and json to print the result in our terminal.

dataset = pd.read_csv('Salary_Data.csv')X = dataset.iloc[:, :-1].valuesy = dataset.iloc[:, 1].values

We have imported the dataset using pandas and separated the features and label from the dataset.

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size = 0.33, random_state = 0)

In this section, we have split our data into train and test size of 0.67 and 0.33 respectively using train_test_split from sklearn.

regressor = LinearRegression()regressor.fit(X_train, y_train)

y_pred = regressor.predict(X_test)

The object is instantiated as a regressor of the class LinearRegression() and trained using X_train and y_train. Latter the predicted results are stored in the y_pred.

pickle.dump(regressor, open('model.pkl','wb'))

We will save our trained model to the disk using the pickle library. Pickle is used to serializing and de-serializing a Python object structure. In which python object is converted into the byte stream. dump() method dumps the object into the file specified in the arguments.

In our case, we want to save our model so that it can be used by the server. So we will save our object regressor to the file named model.pkl.

We can again load the model by the following method,

model = pickle.load(open('model.pkl','rb'))print(model.predict([[1.8]]))

pickle.load() method loads the method and saves the deserialized bytes to model. Predictions can be done using model.predict().

For example, we can predict the salary of the employee who has experience of 1.8 years.

Here, our model.py is ready to train and save the model. The whole code of model.py is as follows.

# Importing the librariesimport numpy as npimport pandas as pdfrom sklearn.model_selection import train_test_splitfrom sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegressionimport pickleimport requestsimport json

# Importing the datasetdataset = pd.read_csv('Salary_Data.csv')X = dataset.iloc[:, :-1].valuesy = dataset.iloc[:, 1].values

# Splitting the dataset into the Training set and Test setX_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size = 1/3, random_state = 0)

# Fitting Simple Linear Regression to the Training setregressor = LinearRegression()regressor.fit(X_train, y_train)

# Predicting the Test set resultsy_pred = regressor.predict(X_test)

# Saving model to diskpickle.dump(regressor, open('model.pkl','wb'))

# Loading model to compare the resultsmodel = pickle.load(open('model.pkl','rb'))print(model.predict([[1.8]]))

2. server.py

In this file, we will use the flask web framework to handle the POST requests that we will get from the request.py.

Importing the methods and libraries that we are going to use in the code.

import numpy as npfrom flask import Flask, request, jsonifyimport pickle

Here we have imported numpy to create the array of requested data, pickle to load our trained model to predict.

In the following section of the code, we have created the instance of the Flask() and loaded the model into the model.

app = Flask(__name__)

model = pickle.load(open('model.pkl','rb'))

Here, we have bounded /api with the method predict(). In which predict method gets the data from the json passed by the requestor. model.predict() method takes input from the json and converts it into 2D numpy array the results are stored into the variable named output and we return this variable after converting it into the json object using flasks jsonify() method.

@app.route('/api',methods=['POST'])def predict():    data = request.get_json(force=True)    prediction = model.predict([[np.array(data['exp'])]])    output = prediction[0]    return jsonify(output)

Finally, we will run our server by following code section. Here I have used port 5000 and have set debug=True since if we get any error we can debug it and solve it.

if __name__ == '__main__':    app.run(port=5000, debug=True)

Here, our server is ready to serve the requests. Here is the whole code of the server.py.

# Import librariesimport numpy as npfrom flask import Flask, request, jsonifyimport pickle

app = Flask(__name__)

# Load the modelmodel = pickle.load(open('model.pkl','rb'))

@app.route('/api',methods=['POST'])def predict():    # Get the data from the POST request.    data = request.get_json(force=True)

    # Make prediction using model loaded from disk as per the data.    prediction = model.predict([[np.array(data['exp'])]])

    # Take the first value of prediction    output = prediction[0]

    return jsonify(output)

if __name__ == '__main__':    app.run(port=5000, debug=True)

3. request.py

As I mentioned earlier that request.py is going to request the server for the predictions.

Here is the whole code to make a request to the server.

import requests

url = 'http://localhost:5000/api'

r = requests.post(url,json={'exp':1.8,})print(r.json())

We have used requests library to make post requests. requests.post() takes URL and the data to be passed in the POST request and the returned results from the servers are stored into the variable r and printed by r.json().

Conclusion

We have created three files model.py, server.py and request.py to train and save a model, to handle the request, to make a request to the server respectively.

After coding all of these files, the sequence to execute the files should be model.py, server.py(in separate terminal) and at the end request.py.

You can compare the results of prediction with a model.py as we printing the result at the end of the file.

You can find all the coding in my Github repository, flask-salary-predictor.

If you found it interesting don’t forget to clap and put down your thoughts below. Thank you :)

Check out my other articles as well.

Code Your Own Popularity Based Recommendation System WITHOUT a Library in Python

Simple linear regression using python without Scikit-Learn

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