Accelerating Causal Inference with NVIDIA RAPIDS and cuML

As the volume of data generated by consumer applications continues to grow, enterprises are increasingly adopting causal inference methods to analyze observational data. This approach provides insights into how changes to specific components impact key business metrics, according to NVIDIA's blog.

Advancements in Causal Inference Techniques

Over the past decade, econometricians have developed a technique known as double machine learning, which integrates machine learning models into causal inference problems. This involves training two predictive models on independent dataset samples and combining them to create a de-biased estimate of the target variable. Open-source Python libraries like DoubleML facilitate this technique, although they face challenges when processing large datasets on CPUs.

The Role of NVIDIA RAPIDS and cuML

NVIDIA RAPIDS, a collection of open-source GPU-accelerated data science and AI libraries, includes cuML, a machine learning library for Python compatible with scikit-learn. By leveraging RAPIDS cuML with the DoubleML library, data scientists can achieve faster causal inference, effectively handling large datasets.

The integration of RAPIDS cuML enables enterprises to utilize computationally intensive machine learning algorithms for causal inference, bridging the gap between prediction-focused innovations and practical applications. This is particularly beneficial when traditional CPU-based methods struggle to meet the demands of growing datasets.

Benchmarking Performance Improvements

The performance of cuML was benchmarked against scikit-learn using a range of dataset sizes. The results demonstrated that on a dataset with 10 million rows and 100 columns, the CPU-based DoubleML pipeline took over 6.5 hours, whereas the GPU-accelerated RAPIDS cuML reduced this time to just 51 minutes, achieving a 7.7x speedup.

Such accelerated machine learning libraries can offer up to a 12x speedup compared to CPU-based methods, with only minimal code adjustments needed. This substantial improvement highlights the potential of GPU acceleration in transforming data processing workflows.

Conclusion

Causal inference plays a crucial role in helping enterprises understand the impact of key product components. However, utilizing machine learning innovations for this purpose has historically been challenging. Techniques like double machine learning, combined with accelerated computing libraries such as RAPIDS cuML, enable enterprises to overcome these challenges, converting hours of processing time into minutes with minimal code changes.