gRPC Baseball Machine Intelligence Predictions - Client & Server

Background: gRPC is an emerging open communication standard set of conventions that is as an option for building connected services. It can be an alternative to REST/SOA based architectures. What makes gRPC compelling for Machine Intelligence (AI, ML) scenarios is it facilitates not only uranary communication, but also bi-directional/streaming as well. Therefore, services such a IoT or streaming media can extract insights using Machine Intelligence dynamically.

This solution is a client-server model implementation in .NET Core. The .NET Core client communicates with a server using gRPC conventions. The server hosts in-memory Machine Learning models, that are surfaced for real-time prediction inference.

In the example above, the server's logs correspond to the client's request logs as the Machine Learning models execute predictions

The gRPC example system has the following features:

• Two projects - client & server communicating with gRPC
• Both the client & server projects will start in parallel to immediately start the communication channel bridge
• Nested Procotol Buffers (proto) exchanging complex messages for Machine Learning inference
• Dozen ML.NET models loaded into memory for configurable predictions
• Individual prediction or ensemble model predictions using baseball data to predict HOF ballot presence or induction

Project Structure:

• Visual Studio 2019 v4.0, C#, .NET Core 3.1, gRPC, ML.NET v1.4

Note: This system focuses on gRPC communication and Machine Learning inference. The models used in this example have been built using a seperate console training job located in a project at this GitHub location:

• https://github.com/bartczernicki/MLDotNet-BaseballClassification

More Information:

• gRPC on .NET Core: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/grpc/?view=aspnetcore-3.1
• Protocol Buffers Message Syntax: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/csharptutorial
• ML.NET: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/machinelearning-ai/ml-dotnet
• NDC Conference Video (From WCF to gRPC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76X9oo-LlUY