Path: blob/master/cloud/notebooks/python_sdk/deployments/spark/Use Spark and batch deployment to predict customer churn.ipynb
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Use Spark and batch deployment to predict customer churn with ibm-watsonx-ai
This notebook contains steps and code to develop a predictive model, and start scoring new data. This notebook introduces commands for getting data and for basic data cleaning and exploration, pipeline creation, model training, model persistance to watsonx.ai Runtime repository, model deployment, and scoring.
Some familiarity with Python is helpful. This notebook uses Python 3.11 and Apache® Spark 3.4.
You will use a data set, Telco Customer Churn, which details anonymous customer data from a telecommunication company. Use the details of this data set to predict customer churn which is very critical to business as it's easier to retain existing customers rather than acquiring new ones.
Learning goals
The learning goals of this notebook are:
Load a CSV file into an Apache® Spark DataFrame.
Explore data.
Prepare data for training and evaluation.
Create an Apache® Spark machine learning pipeline.
Train and evaluate a model.
Persist a pipeline and model in watsonx.ai Runtime repository.
Explore and visualize prediction results using the plotly package.
Deploy a model for batch scoring using Wastson Machine Learning API.
Contents
This notebook contains the following parts:
1. Set up the environment
Before you use the sample code in this notebook, you must perform the following setup tasks:
Create a watsonx.ai Runtime Service instance (a free plan is offered and information about how to create the instance can be found here).
Install and import the ibm-watsonx-ai
and dependecies
Note: ibm-watsonx-ai
documentation can be found here.
Connection to watsonx.ai Runtime
Authenticate the watsonx.ai Runtime service on IBM Cloud. You need to provide platform api_key
and instance location
.
You can use IBM Cloud CLI to retrieve platform API Key and instance location.
API Key can be generated in the following way:
In result, get the value of api_key
from the output.
Location of your watsonx.ai Runtime instance can be retrieved in the following way:
In result, get the value of location
from the output.
Tip: Your Cloud API key
can be generated by going to the Users section of the Cloud console. From that page, click your name, scroll down to the API Keys section, and click Create an IBM Cloud API key. Give your key a name and click Create, then copy the created key and paste it below. You can also get a service specific url by going to the Endpoint URLs section of the watsonx.ai Runtime docs. You can check your instance location in your watsonx.ai Runtime Service instance details.
You can also get service specific apikey by going to the Service IDs section of the Cloud Console. From that page, click Create, then copy the created key and paste it below.
Action: Enter your api_key
and location
in the following cell.
Working with spaces
First, create a space that will be used for your work. If you do not have space already created, you can use Deployment Spaces Dashboard to create one.
Click New Deployment Space
Create an empty space
Select Cloud Object Storage
Select watsonx.ai Runtime instance and press Create
Copy
space_id
and paste it below
Tip: You can also use SDK to prepare the space for your work. More information can be found here.
Action: Assign space ID below
You can use list
method to print all existing spaces.
To be able to interact with all resources available in watsonx.ai Runtime, you need to set space which you will be using.
Test Spark
In this section you will load the data as an Apache® Spark DataFrame and perform a basic exploration.
Explore the loaded data by using the following Apache® Spark DataFrame methods:
print schema
count all records
show distribution of label classes
As you can see, the data contains 21 fields. "Churn" field is the one we would like to predict (label).
Data set contains 7043 records.
Now you will check if all records have complete data.
You can see that there are some missing values you can investigate that all missing values are present in TotalCharges
feature. We will use dataset with missing values removed for model training and evaluation.
Now you will inspect distribution of classes in label column.
3.1: Prepare data
In this subsection you will split your data into: train, test and predict datasets.
As you can see our data has been successfully split into three datasets:
The train data set, which is the largest group, is used for training.
The test data set will be used for model evaluation and is used to test the assumptions of the model.
The predict data set will be used for prediction.
3.2: Create pipeline and train a model
In this section you will create an Apache® Spark machine learning pipeline and then train the model.
In the first step you need to import the Apache® Spark machine learning packages that will be needed in the subsequent steps.
In the following step, convert all the predictors to features vector and label feature convert to numeric.
Next, define estimators you want to use for classification. Logistic Regression is used in the following example.
Let's build the pipeline now. A pipeline consists of transformers and an estimator.
Now, you can train your Logistic Regression model using the previously defined pipeline and train data."
You can check your model accuracy now. To evaluate the model, use test data.
You can tune your model now to achieve better accuracy. For simplicity of this example tuning section is omitted.
In this section you will learn how to store your pipeline and model in watsonx.ai Runtime repository using Python client libraries.
Note: Apache® Spark 3.4 is required.
Save training data in your Cloud Object Storage
ibm-cos-sdk library allows Python developers to manage Cloud Object Storage (COS).
Action: Put credentials from Object Storage Service in Bluemix here.
Action: Define the service endpoint we will use.
Tip: You can find this information in Endpoints section of your Cloud Object Storage instance dashbord.
You also need IBM Cloud authorization endpoint to be able to create COS resource object.
We create COS resource to be able to write data to Cloud Object Storage.
Now you will create bucket in COS and copy training dataset
for model from WA_FnUseC_TelcoCustomerChurn.csv.
Create connections to a COS bucket
Note: The above connection can be initialized alternatively with api_key
and resource_instance_id
.
The above cell can be replaced with:
4.1: Save pipeline and model
In this subsection you will learn how to save pipeline and model artifacts to your watsonx.ai Runtime instance.
Get saved model metadata from watsonx.ai Runtime.
Model Id can be used to retrive latest model version from watsonx.ai Runtime instance.
4.2: Load model
In this subsection you will learn how to load back saved model from specified instance of watsonx.ai Runtime.
As you can see the name is correct. You have already learned how save and load the model from watsonx.ai Runtime repository.
In this section you will learn how to load data from batch scoring and visualize the prediction results with plotly package.
5.1: Make local prediction using previously loaded model and test data
In this subsection you will score predict_data data set.
Preview the results by calling the show() method on the predictions DataFrame.
By tabulating a count, you can see the split between labels.
In this section you will learn how to create batch deployment and to score a new data record by using the watsonx.ai REST API. For more information about REST APIs, see the Swagger Documentation.
6.1 Prepare scoring data for batch job
Get data for prediction
First, download scoring data into notebook's filesystem
6.2: Create batch deployment
Now you can create a batch scoring endpoint. Execute the following sample code that uses the published_model_ID value to create the scoring endpoint for predictions.
Create batch deployment for published model
Batch deployment has been created.
You can retrieve now your deployment ID.
You can also list all deployments in your space.
If you want to get additional information on your deployment, you can do it as below.
Tip: To install pandas execute !pip install pandas
Now, your job has been submitted to Spark runtime.
You can retrieve now your job ID.
You can also list all jobs in your space.
If you want to get additional information on your job, you can do it as below.
Monitor job execution
Here you can check status of your batch scoring. When status of Spark job is completed
the results will be written to scoring_output file in Object Storage.
Get scored data
If you want to clean up all created assets:
experiments
trainings
pipelines
model definitions
models
functions
deployments
please follow up this sample notebook.
You successfully completed this notebook! You learned how to use Apache Spark machine learning as well as watsonx.ai Runtime for model creation and deployment. Check out our Online Documentation for more samples, tutorials, documentation, how-tos, and blog posts.
Author
Amadeusz Masny, Python Software Developer at watsonx.ai
Mateusz Szewczyk, Software Engineer at watsonx.ai
Copyright © 2020-2025 IBM. This notebook and its source code are released under the terms of the MIT License.