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  1. Data Modeling

If you want to skip ahead, you can find the full source code for this tutorial on GitHub.

In this example, we’ll consider a fintech use-case where we want to detect fraudulent credit card purchases. Our data consists of a list of credit card transactions, each with a timestamp, a location, and a purchase amount. We also have information about the cardholder and the accounts that the card is linked to.

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Define features

We’ll start by modeling the features we want for our the users in our system. We’ll start simple with three scalar features: user.id, user.name, and user.email. First, we’ll create a new file called models.py where we’ll define a User class decorated with @features.

src/user.py
from chalk.features import features

@features
class User:
    id: int

    # The name the user provided to us at signup.
    # :owner: identity@chalk.ai
    # :tags: pii
    name: str

    # :tags: pii
    email: str

Note that at this point, we haven’t defined how to compute these features. We are only thinking about the data that we would like to have.

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Primary keys

There are a few things to note here. First, all our feature classes need to have a unique id field. By default, this is the field named id. However, if you want to use a different field as the primary key, you can specify it using the Primary argument to @features.

src/user.py
from chalk.features import features

@features
class User:
  id: int
  user_id: Primary[int]
  name: str
  email: str

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Tags, Descriptions, & Owners

In our features below, we’ve added some comments and annotations to our features. These are optional, but can be useful for documentation and for setting alerting policies. For example, you may wish to send PagerDuty alerts to different teams based on the owner of the related feature.

Any of the comments and tags from the code also show up in the Chalk dashboard, and are indexed for search.

For example, we’ve added a pii tag to the name and email fields. This means that these fields will be treated as personally identifiable information and will be subject to additional restrictions.

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Has-One Relationships

Next up, we’ll define a related feature class to our users. We’ll call this class Account and it will represent a bank account that a user owns.

src/models.py
from chalk.features import features

@features
class Account:
    id: int

    # The name of the owner of the account.
    title: str

    # The id of the user that owns this account.
    user_id: int

    # The balance of the account, in dollars.
    balance: float

This should look much like what we did for the User class. However, we may want to link these two classes together. We can do this by adding a user field to the Account class.

src/models.py
@features
class Account:
  id: int
  user_id: int
  user_id: User.id
  balance: float

  # The user that owns this account.
  user: User

This denotes that each account has one user, and that the Account.user_id and the User.id are equal and of type int, as described by Account.user_id.

Once we’ve defined the relationship on one side of the join, we can define the inverse relationship on the other side without needing to specify the predicate again.

src/models.py
@features
class User:
  id: int
  name: str
  email: str

  # The account that this user owns.
  account: "Account"

​
Has-Many Relationships

The final feature entity that we’ll define in this tutorial is for transactions. Each account has many transactions, and each transaction is linked to a single account. We’ll define the Transaction class and link it to our Account class as follows:

src/models.py
from chalk.features import features
from chalk.features import features, DataFrame

class TransactionStatus(str, Enum):
    PENDING = "pending"
    CLEARED = "cleared"
    FAILED = "failed"

@features
class Transaction:
   id: int

   # The id of the account that this transaction belongs to, set to a join.
   account_id: "Account.id"

   # The amount of the transaction, in dollars.
   amount: float

   # The status of the transaction, defined as an enum above.
   status: TransactionStatus

   # Because we define the join condition between
   # `Transaction` and `Account` below, we don't
   # need to repeat it here.
   account: "Account"

@features
class User:
  id: int
  name: str
  email: str

  # The account that this user owns.
  account: "Account"

@features
class Account:
  id: int
  user_id: User.id
  balance: float
  user: User
  transactions: DataFrame[Transaction]

This is the first time we’re seeing the DataFrame type.

A Chalk DataFrame models tabular data in much the same way that pandas does. However, there are some key differences that allow the Chalk DataFrame to increase type safety and performance.

Like pandas, Chalk’s DataFrame is a two-dimensional data structure with rows and columns. You can perform operations like filtering, grouping, and aggregating on a DataFrame. However, there are two main differences.

  • Lazy implementation - Chalk’s DataFrame is lazy and can be backed by multiple data sources, where a pandas.DataFrame executes eagerly in memory.
  • Use as a type - Chalk’s DataFrame[...] can be used to represent a type of data with pre-defined filters.

You can read more about the Chalk DataFrame in the docs and API Reference.

You might also notice that we’ve used an Enum feature here. Chalk supports many feature types, including Enum, lists and sets, and @dataclasses.