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Building an Extensible, rEproducible, Test-driven, Harmonized, Open-source, Versioned, ENsemble model for air quality <a href="https://niehs.github.io/beethoven"><img align="right" src="man/figures/beethoven-logo.png" width="168px" alt="two hexagons with distributed tan, orange, and teal with geometric symbols placed. Two hexagons are diagonally placed from the top left to the bottom right" /><a>

<p>

R-CMD-check cov lint Lifecycle: experimental

Group Project for the Spatiotemporal Exposures and Toxicology group with help from friends :smiley: :cowboy_hat_face: :earth_americas:

</p>

Installation

remotes::install_github("NIEHS/beethoven")

Overall Project Workflow

Targets: Make-like Reproducible Analysis Pipeline

  1. AQS Data
  2. Generate Covariates
  3. Fit Base Learners
  4. Fit Meta Learners
  5. Predictions
  6. Summary Stats
graph TD

    subgraph AQS data with `amadeus`
        AQS[PM2.5 download]-->AQS2[PM2.5 Process]
    end

    AQS2 --> Cov1
    AQS2 --> Cov2
    AQS2 --> Cov3
    AQS2 --> Cov4
    subgraph Covariate Calculation with `amadeus`
        Cov1[Meterology]
        Cov2[NLCD]
        Cov3[...]
        Cov4[MERRA2]
    end

    subgraph Processed Covariates
        PC[Baselearner Input]
    end

    Cov1 --> PC
    Cov2 --> PC
    Cov3 --> PC
    Cov4 --> PC

    PC --> A1
    PC --> A2
    PC --> A3
    subgraph MLP Baselearner   
        A1[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B1A[Spatial CV]
        A1[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B1B[Temporal CV]
        A1[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B1C[Space/Time CV]
        B1A --> C1[3. M_i is fit with a MLP model]
        B1B --> C1
        B1C --> C1
    end

    subgraph LightGBM Baselearner
        A2[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B2A[Spatial CV]
        A2[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B2B[Temporal CV]
        A2[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B2C[Space/Time CV]
        B2A --> C2[3. M_i is fit with a LightGBM model]
        B2B --> C2
        B2C --> C2
    end
    subgraph Elastic-Net Baselearner
        A3[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B3A[Spatial CV]
        A3[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B3B[Temporal CV]
        A3[ M_i is a 30% random sample of N] --> B3C[Space/Time CV]
        B3A --> C3[3. M_i is fit with a glmnet model]
        B3B --> C3
        B3C --> C3
    end
    C1 --> D1[Elastic-Net Meta-Learner]
    C2 --> D1[Elastic-Net Meta-Learner]
    C3 --> D1[Elastic-Net Meta-Learner]

    subgraph Meta-Learner Phase
        D1 --> E1[Perform 50% column-wise subsampling K times]
        E1 --> E1b[Proper Scoring CRPS CV with 1 of 3 categories with equal probability, Spatial, Temporal, or Space/Time]
        E1b --> M1[Elastic-Net Model 1]
        E1b --> M2[Elastic-Net Model 2]
        E1b --> M3[Elastic-Net Model 3]
        E1b --> M4[Elastic-Net Model K-1]
        E1b --> M5[Elastic-Net Model K]
    end


    subgraph Posterior Summary
        M1 --> P1[Complete Posterior Summary at daily, 1-km]
        M2 --> P1
        M3 --> P1
        M4 --> P1
        M5 --> P1
        P1 --> P5[Version and Deploy with Vetiver]
        P1 --> P2[Spatial and Temporal Average Summaries]
        P2 --> P5
    end

   style A1 fill:#d3d3d3,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B1A fill:#d3d3d3,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B1B fill:#d3d3d3,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B1C fill:#d3d3d3,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style C1 fill:#d3d3d3,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px     

    style A2 fill:#62C6F2,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B2A fill:#62C6F2,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B2B fill:#62C6F2,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B2C fill:#62C6F2,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style C2 fill:#62C6F2,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px     

    style A3 fill:#ffb09c,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B3A fill:#ffb09c,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B3B fill:#ffb09c,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style B3C fill:#ffb09c,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style C3 fill:#ffb09c,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px     

    style P1 fill:#abf7b1,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style P2 fill:#abf7b1,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px
    style P5 fill:#abf7b1,stroke:#000,stroke-width:2px

Placeholder for up-to-date rendering of targets

tar_visnetwork(targets)

Project Organization

Here, we describe the structure of the project and the naming conventions used. The most up to date file paths and names are recorded here for reference.

File Structure

Folder Structure

The following sub-directories are not including the package build and included only in the source code here

Relevant files

Naming Conventions

Naming things is hard and somewhat subjective. Nonetheless, consistent naming conventions make for better reproducibility, interpretability, and future extensibility. Here, we provide the beethoven naming conventions for objects as used in targets and for naming functions within the package (i.e. R/). For tar_target functions, we use the following naming conventions:

Naming conventions for targets objects. We are motivated by the Compositional Forecast (CF) model naming conventions:

e.g. [surface] [component] standard_name [at surface] [in medium] [due to process] [assuming condition] In CF, the entire process can be known from the required and optional naming pieces.

Here, we use the following naming convention:

[R object type]_[role-suffix]_[stage]_[source]_[spacetime]

Each section is in the brackets [] and appears in this order. For some objects, not all naming sections are required. If two keywords in a section apply, then they are appended with a -

Examples: 1) sf_PM25_log10-fit_AQS_siteid is an sf object for PM25 data that is log-transformed and ready for base-learner fitting, derived from AQS data and located at the siteid locations. 2) SpatRast_process_MODIS is a terra SpatRast object that has been processed from MODIS.

Naming section definitions:

Function Naming Convenctions

We have adopted naming conventions in functions in this package as well as amadeus which is a key input package.

[High-Level-Process]_[Source]_[Object]

To run the pipeline

Post-checkout hook setting

As safeguard measures, we limit the write permission of _targets.R to authorized users. To activate post-checkout hook, run setup_hook.sh at the project root.

. setup_hook.sh

The write privilege lock is applied immediately. Users will be able to run the pipeline with the static _targets.R file to (re-)generate outputs from the pipeline.

User settings

beethoven pipeline is configured for SLURM with defaults for NIEHS HPC settings. For adapting the settings to users' environment, consult with the documentation of your platform and edit the _targets.R and inst/targets/targets_calculate.R (i.e., resource management) accordingly.

Setting _targets.R

For general users, all targets objects and meta information can be saved in a directory other than the pipeline default by changing store value in tar_config_set() at _targets.R in project root.

# replacing yaml file.
tar_config_set(
  store = "__your_directory__"
)

Users could comment out the three lines to keep targets in _targets directory under the project root. Common arguments are generated in the earlier lines in _targets.R file. Details of the function generating the arguments, set_args_calc, are described in the following.

Using set_args_calc

set_args_calc function exports or returns common parameters that are used repeatedly throughout the calculation process. The default commands are as below:

set_args_calc(
  char_siteid = "site_id",
  char_timeid = "time",
  char_period = c("2018-01-01", "2022-12-31"),
  num_extent = c(-126, -62, 22, 52),
  char_user_email = paste0(Sys.getenv("USER"), "@nih.gov"),
  export = FALSE,
  path_export = "inst/targets/calc_spec.qs",
  path_input = "input",
  nthreads_nasa = 14L,
  nthreads_tri = 5L,
  nthreads_geoscf = 10L,
  nthreads_gmted = 4L,
  nthreads_narr = 24L,
  nthreads_groads = 3L,
  nthreads_population = 3L
)

All arguments except for char_siteid and char_timeid should be carefully set to match users' environment. export = TRUE is recommended if there is no pre-generated qs file for calculation parameters. For more details, consult ?set_args_calc after loading beethoven in your R interactive session.

Running the pipeline

After switching to the project root directory (in terminal, cd [project_root], replace [project_root] with the proper path), users can run the pipeline.

[!NOTE] With export = TRUE, it will take some time to proceed to the next because it will recursively search hdf file paths. The time is affected by the number of files to search or the length of the period (char_period).

[!WARNING] Please make sure that you are at the project root before proceeding to the following. The HPC example requires additional edits related to SBATCH directives and project root directory.

Rscript inst/targets/targets_start.R &

Or in NIEHS HPC, modify several lines to match your user environment:

# ...
#SBATCH --output=YOUR_PATH/pipeline_out.out
#SBATCH --error=YOUR_PATH/pipeline_err.err
# ...
# The --mail-user flag is optional
#SBATCH --mail-user=MYACCOUNT@nih.gov
# ...
USER_PROJDIR=/YOUR/PROJECT/ROOT
nohup nice -4 Rscript $USER_PROJDIR/inst/targets/targets_start.R

YOUR_PATH, MYACCOUNT and /YOUR_PROJECT_ROOT should be changed. In the end, you can run the following command:

sbatch inst/targets/run.sh

The script will submit a job with effective commands with SLURM level directives defined by lines starting #SBATCH, which allocate CPU threads and memory from the specified partition.

inst/targets/run.sh includes several lines exporting environment variables to bind GDAL/GEOS/PROJ versions newer than system default, geospatial packages built upon these libraries, and the user library location where required packages are installed. The environment variables need to be changed following NIEHS HPC system changes in the future.

[!WARNING] set_args_* family for downloading and summarizing prediction outcomes will be added in the future version.

Developer's guide

Preamble

The objective of this document is to provide developers with the current implementation of beethoven pipeline for version 0.3.9.

We assume the potential users have basic knowledge of targets and tarchetypes packages as well as functional and meta-programming. It is recommended to read Advanced R (by Hadley Wickham)'s chapters for these topics.

Pipeline component and basic implementation

The pipeline is based on targets package. All targets are stored in a designated storage, which can be either a directory path or a URL when one uses cloud storage or web servers. Here we classify the components into three groups:

  1. Pipeline execution components: the highest level script to run the pipeline.
  2. Pipeline configuration components: function arguments that are injected into the functions in each target.
  3. Pipeline target components: definitions of each target, essentially lists of targets::tar_target() call classified by pipeline steps

Let's take a moment to be a user. You should consult specific file when:

[!NOTE] Please expand the toggle below to display function trees for inst/targets/targets_*.R files. Only functions that are directly called in each file are displayed due to screen real estate and readability concerns.

<details> <summary>`targets_*.R` file function tree</summary> 
graph LR

    %% Define styles for the target files
    style arglist fill:#ffcccc,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    style baselearner fill:#ccffcc,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    style calculateF fill:#ccccff,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    style download fill:#ffccff,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    style initialize fill:#ccffff,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    style metalearner fill:#ffffcc,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    style predict fill:#ffcc99,stroke-width:2px,stroke:#000000,opacity:0.5
    
    %% Define the target files as nodes
    arglist["**inst/targets/targets_arglist.R**"]
    baselearner["**inst/targets/targets_baselearner.R**"]
    calculateF["**inst/targets/targets_calculate.R**"]
    download["**inst/targets/targets_download.R**"]
    initialize["**inst/targets/targets_initialize.R**"]
    metalearner["**inst/targets/targets_metalearner.R**"]
    predict["**inst/targets/targets_predict.R**"]

    %% Define the branches with arrowhead connections
    fargdown["`set_args_download`"] ---|`set_args_download`| arglist
    fargcalc["`set_args_calc`"] ---|`set_args_calc`| arglist
    fraw["`feature_raw_download`"] ---|`feature_raw_download`| download
    readlocs["`read_locs`"] ---|`read_locs`| initialize
    fitbase["`fit_base_learner`"] ---|`fit_base_learner`| baselearner
    switchmodel["`switch_model`"] ---|`switch_model`| baselearner
    makesub["`make_subdata`"] ---|`make_subdata`| baselearner
    covindexrset["`convert_cv_index_rset`"] ---|`convert_cv_index_rset`| baselearner
    attach["`attach_xy`"] ---|`attach_xy`| baselearner
    gencvsp["`generate_cv_index_sp`"] ---|`generate_cv_index_sp`| baselearner
    gencvts["`generate_cv_index_ts`"] ---|`generate_cv_index_ts`| baselearner
    gencvspt["`generate_cv_index_spt`"] ---|`generate_cv_index_spt`| baselearner
    switchrset["`switch_generate_cv_rset`"] ---|`switch_generate_cv_rset`| baselearner
    fcalc["`calculate`"] ---|`calculate`| calculateF
    fcalcinj["`inject_calculate`"] ---|`inject_calculate`| calculateF
    fcalcinjmod["`inject_modis_par`"] ---|`inject_modis_par`| calculateF
    fcalcinjgmted["`inject_gmted`"] ---|`inject_gmted`| calculateF
    fcalcinjmatch["`inject_match`"] ---|`inject_match`| calculateF
    fcalcgeos["`calc_geos_strict`"] ---|`calc_geos_strict`| calculateF
    fcalcgmted["`calc_gmted_direct`"] ---|`calc_gmted_direct`| calculateF
    fcalcnarr2["`calc_narr2`"] ---|`calc_narr2`| calculateF
    fparnarr["`par_narr`"] ---|`par_narr`| calculateF
    fmetalearn["`fit_meta_learner`"] ---|`fit_meta_learner`| metalearner
    G["`pred`"] ---|`pred`| predict

    %% Apply thin solid dark grey lines to the branches
    classDef branchStyle stroke-width:1px,stroke:#333333
    class fargdown,fargcalc,fraw,readlocs,fitbase,switchmodel,makesub,covindexrset,attach,gencvsp,gencvts,gencvspt,switchrset,fcalc,fcalcinj,fcalcinjmod,fcalcinjgmted,fcalcinjmatch,fcalcgeos,fcalcgmted,fcalcnarr2,fparnarr,fmetalearn,G branchStyle
</details>

The details of argument injection is illustrated below. The specific arguments to inject are loaded from QS files that are required to be saved in inst/targets directory. Each QS file contains a nested list object where function arguments for downloading raw data and calculating features are defined and store.

inst/targets/download_spec.qs

The file is generated by a beethoven function set_args_download. In _targets.R file, one can skip to generate this file if raw data download is already done or unnecessary.

generate_list_download <- FALSE

arglist_download <-
  set_args_download(
    char_period = c("2018-01-01", "2022-12-31"),
    char_input_dir = "input",
    nasa_earth_data_token = NULL,#Sys.getenv("NASA_EARTHDATA_TOKEN"),
    export = generate_list_download,
    path_export = "inst/targets/download_spec.qs"
  )

inst/targets/calc_spec.qs

set_args_calc() function will generate this file. The file name can be changed (path_export = "inst/targets/calc_spec.qs"), but it must start with calc_ as the file name prefix is used to search QS files to manage different periods. Like download_spec.qs, whether or not to run this function can be specified by a logical variable named generate_list_calc in _targets.R file.

generate_list_calc <- FALSE

arglist_common <-
  set_args_calc(
    char_siteid = "site_id",
    char_timeid = "time",
    char_period = c("2018-01-01", "2022-12-31"),
    num_extent = c(-126, -62, 22, 52),
    char_user_email = paste0(Sys.getenv("USER"), "@nih.gov"),
    export = generate_list_calc,
    path_export = "inst/targets/calc_spec.qs",
    char_input_dir = "/ddn/gs1/group/set/Projects/NRT-AP-Model/input"
  )

QUESTION: Where (which function calls) and when is inst/targets/init_target.sh used?

As a compromise between the layouts for standard R packages and targets pipelines, we mainly keep tar_target() definitions in inst/targets/, whereas the targets required components are stored in the project root. All targets are recorded in _targets/ directory by default, and it can be changed to somewhere else by defining an external directory at store argument in tar_config_set() in _targets.R. If you change that part in _targets.R, you should run init_targets_storage.sh in the project root to create the specified directory.

. init_targets_storage.sh

# replacing yaml file.
tar_config_set(
  store = "/__your__desired__location__"
)

Before running the pipeline

For the future release and tests on various environments, one should check several lines across R and shell script files:

      # modify it into the proper directory path. and output/error paths in the
      # # SBATCH directives
      USER_PROJDIR=/ddn/gs1/home/$USER/projects

      nohup nice -4 Rscript $USER_PROJDIR/beethoven/inst/targets/targets_start.R

Basic structure of branches

We will call "grand target" as a set of branches if any branching technique is applied at a target.

When one target is branched out, the grand target should be a list, either being a nested or a plain list, depending on the context or the command run inside each branch. Branch names include automatic hash after the grand target name as a suffix. Users may use their own suffixes for legibility. Branches have their own good to provide succinct network layout (i.e., an interactive plot generated by tar_visnetwork(targets_only = TRUE)), while they add complication to debug. It is strongly advised that the unit function that is applied to each branch should be fully tested.

Branching in beethoven

Branching is actively employed in most parts in beethoven. Here we will navigate which targets are branched out and rationales for branching in each target.

Downloading raw data from the source

Download targets are separated from the calculation-model fitting sequence and operate a bit different from other targets. Arguments stored in a QS file or QS files (inst/targets/download_*.qs) are injected to amadeus::download_data() and it will initiate building raw data download targets. The target is rigorous branched out thus is represented as one square node when one runs targets::tar_visnetwork(). Building the target named 'lgl_rawdir_download' will download the raw data from the internet and it will be performed sequentially under the current setting.

Users may bypass the downloading targets by setting a temporary system variable with Sys.setenv("BTV_DOWNLOAD_PASS" = "FALSE"), which is included in _targets.R.

# bypass option
Sys.setenv("BTV_DOWNLOAD_PASS" = "FALSE")

# abridged for display...

# # nullify download target if bypass option is set
if (Sys.getenv("BTV_DOWNLOAD_PASS") == "TRUE") {
  target_download <- NULL
}

list_feat_calc_base

Per beethoven targets naming convention, this object will be a list and it has eight elements at the first level. We use "first level" here as the list is nested. It is also related to maintain list_feat_calc_base_flat at the following target. Eight elements are defined in a preceding target chr_iter_calc_features:

    tar_target(
      chr_iter_calc_features,
      command = c("hms", "tri", "nei",
                  "ecoregions", "koppen", "population", "groads"),
      iteration = "list",
      description = "Feature calculation"
    )

Using inject_calculate function and argument lists generated by set_args_calc function, chr_iter_calc_features are passed to amadeus functions for calculation. Please note that the pattern of list_feat_calc_base is not simply map(chr_iter_calc_features), rather cross(file_prep_calc_args, chr_iter_calc_features), for potential expansion to keep multiple argument files in the future.

Each element in chr_iter_calc_features is iterated as a list then list_feat_calc_base will be a nested list. list_feat_calc_base will merge nested elements into one data.frame (data.table actually), resulting in a non-nested list, which means each element in this list object is a data.frame.

list_feat_calc_nlcd

From version 0.3.10, NLCD target is separated from list_feat_calc_base from runtime concerns. Here we take nested parallelization strategy, where each amadeus::calc_nlcd() run with different year and buffer size is parallelized where each will use 10 threads. In the initial study period, we have six combinations (two NLCD years in 2019 and 2021, and three radii of 1, 10, and 50 kilometers). Thus, the NLCD target will use 60 threads, but not necessarily concurrently. Each combination will get its slot in the resulting list target, therefore the following dt_feat_calc_nlcd is created by data.frame pivotting.

list_feat_calc_nasa

MODIS-VIIRS product processing is a bit more complex than others since many preprocessing steps are involved in this raw data. Please note that chr_iter_calc_nasa divides MOD19A2 product by spatial resolution since difference in spatial resolution of raster layers makes it difficult to stack layers that can be advantageous to improve processing speed. The branching itself is simple to use a character vector of length 7 to iterate the process, but there is a different avenue that might introduce complexity in terms of computational infrastructure and implementation of parallel processing.

We introduced nested parallelization to expedite the MODIS/VIIRS processing, where tar_make_future will submit jobs per MODIS/VIIRS product code via SLURM batchtools and multiple threads are used in each job. If one wants to make a transition to crew based pipeline operation in the future, this part indeed requires a tremendous amount of refactoring not only in beethoven functions but also amadeus functions considering features of crew/mirai workers which are different from future.

list_feat_calc_geoscf

We use a character vector of length 2 to distinguish chm from aqc products. A modified version of amadeus::calc_geos, calc_geos_strict is employed to calculate features. The key modification is to fix the radius argument as zero then to remove the top-level argument radius from the function.

list_feat_calc_gmted

Here we use custom function calc_gmted_direct, which has different logic from what was used in amadeus::calc_gmted. inject_gmted uses that function to parallelize the calculation by radius length.

list_feat_calc_narr

Again, modified functions process_narr2 and calc_narr2 are applied and the parallelization for NARR data is done by par_narr. Here we did not branch out by NARR variable names since they are a bit long (length of 46) such that each dispatched branch will add up overhead to submit SLURM job for each variable.

Merge branches

Functions with prefix post_calc_ merge branches, which contain various internal structures. Most of the branches are list of depth 1, which means data.frame or data.table objects are in each list element. Others are list of depth 2.

Tackling space-time discrepancy

Each source data have different temporal resolution and update frequency. This leads to the different dimensions across targets due to the measures to save time for computation. For example, NLCD targets will get N (number of sites) times 2 (2019 and 2021 per initial study period as of August 2024), whereas NARR targets will get N times $|D|$ (where $D$ is the set of dates), which equals to the full site-date combinations during the study period. To tackle the discrepancy across calculated targets, automatic expansion strategy is implemented by inferring temporal resolution from targets. Automatic expansion starts from resolving native temporal resolution from each target then proceeds to adding a provisional field year from date, which is removed after all required join operations will be completed. Most of the time, date-to-year conversion is performed internally in expand functions in beethoven and full space-time data.frame is prioritized to left join the multiple targets.

Value filling strategies

Temporal resolution discrepancy makes NA values in joined data.frames. In MODIS/VIIRS targets, NDVI (a subdataset of MOD13A1 product) is based on a 16-day cycle, differing from other products on a daily cycle. We consider the reported date of "16-day cycle" as the last day of the cycle.

Autojoin functions

Automatic join function post_calc_autojoin is one of the most complex function in beethoven codebase, which encapsulates the efforts to resolve all sorts of space-time discrepancies across targets. Full and coarse site-date combinations and full and coarse site-year combinations are automatically resolved in the function. The coarse site-year combination is a challenge since some years are out of the study period and such anchor years should be repeated to fill in for no gaps in the joined data. Another post_calc_df_year_expand and its upstream post_calc_year_expand function repeat coarse site-year data.frames properly to ensure that there will be no years with missing values.

post_calc_autojoin <-
  function(
    df_fine,
    df_coarse,
    field_sp = "site_id",
    field_t = "time",
    year_start = 2018L,
    year_end = 2022L
  ) {
    # Dataset specific preprocessing
    if (any(grepl("population", names(df_coarse)))) {
      df_coarse <- df_coarse[, -c("time"), with = FALSE]
    }

    # Detect common field names
    common_field <- intersect(names(df_fine), names(df_coarse))

    # Clean inputs to retain necessary fields
    df_fine <- data.table::as.data.table(df_fine)
    df_coarse <- data.table::as.data.table(df_coarse)
    df_fine <- post_calc_drop_cols(df_fine)
    df_coarse <- post_calc_drop_cols(df_coarse)

    # Take strategy depending on the length of common field names
    # Length 1 means that `site_id` is the only intersecting field
    if (length(common_field) == 1) {
      print(common_field)
      if (common_field == field_sp) {
        joined <- data.table::merge.data.table(
          df_fine, df_coarse,
          by = field_sp,
          all.x = TRUE
        )
      }
    }
    # When space-time join is requested,
    if (length(common_field) == 2) {
      if (all(common_field %in% c(field_sp, field_t))) {
        # Type check to characters
        df_fine[[field_t]] <- as.character(df_fine[[field_t]])
        df_coarse[[field_t]] <- as.character(df_coarse[[field_t]])
        
        # When `time` field contains years, `as.Date` call will return error(s)
        t_coarse <- try(as.Date(df_coarse[[field_t]][1]))
        # If an error is detected, print information
        if (inherits(t_coarse, "try-error")) {
          message(
            "The time field includes years. Trying different join strategy."
          )
          coarse_years <- sort(unique(unlist(as.integer(df_coarse[[field_t]]))))
          
          # coarse site-year combination is expanded
          df_coarse2 <- post_calc_df_year_expand(
            df_coarse,
            time_start = year_start,
            time_end = year_end,
            time_available = coarse_years
          )
          joined <-
            post_calc_join_yeardate(df_coarse2, df_fine, field_t, field_t)
        } else {
          # site-date combination data.frames are joined as they are regardless of coarseness
          # Left join is enforced
          joined <- data.table::merge.data.table(
            df_fine, df_coarse,
            by = c(field_sp, field_t),
            all.x = TRUE
          )
        }
      }
    }
    return(joined)
  }

Managing calculated features

The calculation configuration files can be multiple, which means the calculated feature targets can also be multiple. The dt_feat_calc_cumulative target operates differently depending on the existence of a *.qs file in the output/qs directory. If there is any *.qs file in the output/qs directory, the dt_feat_calc_design target will be appended (i.e., rbind()-ed) to the contents of the *.qs files. The first run will assign a file name string to dt_feat_calc_cumulative.

append_predecessors(
  path_qs = "output/qs",
  period_new = arglist_common$char_period,
  input_new = dt_feat_calc_design,
  nthreads = arglist_common$nthreads_append
)

Imputation

The calculated features contain a fair amount of NA or NaNs depending on the raw dataset. We distinguish these into "true zeros" and "true missing" for the subsequent imputation process. For imputation, missRanger is used. The missRanger arguments can be adjusted in the impute_all() function.

Base learners

For efficiency, GPU-enabled version is recommended for xgboost/lightgbm and brulee. These packages need to be installed manually with modifications of system environment variables. Developers should consult lightgbm official documentation for building the package by hand, xgboost GitHub repository release page for installing the CUDA version manually and brulee GitHub repository (i.e., in gpu branch) to install the proper version of each package with careful consideration on the computing infrastructure. "GPU" here refers to CUDA-enabled devices produced by NVIDIA corporation. This does not necessarily mean that this package as a part of U.S. government work endorses NVIDIA corporation and its products in any sort.

[!WARNING] As of version 0.3.10, xgboost < v2.1.0 should be used due to breaking changes in v2.1.0 in handling additional arguments in xgb.DMatrix (cf. xgboost pull record), which leads to break parsnip::boost_tree() function call.

tidymodels infrastructure

We want to actively adopt evolving packages in the tidymodels ecosystem while keeping as minimal dependency tree as possible. In this package, major tidymodels packages that are used in base and meta learners include--

Branching

With rigorous branching, we maintain the base learner fitting targets as one node with 900 branches, which include $\texttt{3 (base learners)}\times texttt{3 (CV strategies)}\times \texttt{100 resamples}$. LightGBM and multilayer perceptron models are running on GPUs, while elastic net models are fit on CPUs.

Cross validation

Due to rsample design, each cross-validation fold will include an actual data.frame (tibble) object. It has own good for self-contained modeling practices that easily guarantee reproducibility, however, it also has limitations when used with large data and targets pipeline as targets stores such objects in disk space. Such characteristics lead to inflate the disk space for base and meta learner training. Ten-fold cross-validation sets from 900K*3.2K data.frame take $9\texttt{M} \times 3.2\texttt{K} \times 8\texttt{bytes}$=230GB. Randomization schemes for model ensemble will increase that size to 10 times and more, which is equivalent to 2.3TB and more when uncompressed. The current development version modifies the original rsample's rset design to store row indices of the joined data.frame target to reduce data size in disk.

Use rset object in the last resort

rset object is a powerful tool to ensure that all cross-validation sets "flow" through the modeling process, but has a limitation in large-scale modeling with target: storage issues. When one stores rset objects in the pipeline even with a mild randomization (e.g., 30% row sampling in the base learner step in beethoven pipeline), the total disk space required to keep rset object easily exceed several times of the original data.frame object. Thus, we prefer to keep row indices to restore rset object inside each base learner fitting function. Row indices here are derived from the row subsamples for base learners. targets will only store row indices bound with each subsample, such that the total usage of storage will be reduced significantly. Besides the disk space concerns, it has its own good to reduce the overhead or I/O for compressing massive data.frame (actually, tibble) objects.

fit_base_learner() is a quite long and versatile function that accepts a dozen arguments, therefore developers should be aware of each component in the function. The current implementation separated parsnip and tune parts from fit_base_learner(). The flowchart of fit_base_learner() is displayed below.

graph TD
    %% Define the target files as nodes
    frecipe["minimal data"]
    fittune["tuning results"]
    fmodel["parsnip model definition"]
    ftune["tuning functions"] 
    bestmodel["best model from tuning"]
    bestworkflow["workflow of the best model"]
    fitmodel["fitted best model with full data"]
    bestfit["predicted values from one base learner"]


    %% Define the branches with arrowhead connections
    frecipe ---|recipes::recipe()| fittune
    fmodel ---|`switch_model()`| fittune
    ftune ---|`tune_*()`| fittune
    fittune ---|tune::select_best()| bestmodel
    bestmodel ---|tune::finalize_workflow()| bestworkflow
    bestworkflow ---|parsnip::fit()| fitmodel
    fitmodel ---|predict()| bestfit

Containerization