Using Bigquery ML for Advertising

This project provides a Terraform deployment to create a new Google Cloud project that hosts a copy of the thelook_ecommerce public dataset and applies different Bigquery Machine Learning technics for advertising purposes.

Disclaimer : This is not supported code by Google and is provided as is, without warranties of any kind.

This terraform deployment uses the thelook_ecommerce dataset to do the following :

• Generate a product description based on the product Brand, Name and Category using GenAI
• Create segments on sales per brand, product categories and location
• Recommend products based on the previous purchases and most sold products

For those three use cases, we employ three ML algorithms that are common in the industry and that are provided as a service within Google Cloud bigquery :

• Generative AI using the text-bison LLM from Google. This has various applications for campaigns automation, creative optimization, personalization, localization, sentiment analysis, and other use cases.
• K-means for clustering. This is used for very various cases in the industry from products classification, building cohorts, customer segments, recommendation, personalization, targeting,...
• Matrix Factorization is a common technique for recommendation systems, behavior analysis, cross selling, A/B testing, dimensional reduction and many more.

Architecture Design

This terraform will create a new project in your environment, create a Bigquery dataset and initiate a Bigquery transfer from the thelook_ecommerce public dataset to your environment. It will then create some BQML models in trained on your dataset and initiate a connection to Vertex AI for the LLM.

See below the next section to explore how you can use the created models.

We will be choosing our training models as per the recommended selection guide proposed by Google Cloud

Components

This project mainly relies on Google Cloud BigQuery. It uses a copy of bigquery-public-data.thelook_ecommerce locally in the newly created project to host views and models.

We also use Vertex AI for Generative AI and use the text-bison remote model as an LLM to generate article descriptions.

Setup

Prerequisites

You will need to have a working installation of terraform. The working version at the time writing this deployment is Version 1.6.6. Upon initialization, the latest Terraform Google Cloud Provider will be downloaded (currently v5.11.0).

Since not all is implemented in the Google Cloud Terraform Provider or through the API, you will need to install the following tools to use this deployment :

• gcloud official Google Cloud cli
• bq included with the gcloud installer

You will also need to have a power user with sufficient rights to create projects, administrate BigQuery and Vertex AI.

Dependencies

This deployment uses modules from the Cloud Foundation Fabric provided by Google Cloud. Hence the easiest way to install is to put the content of this repo in a folder that is in the root of you cloud foundation fabric folder to access the modules.

Set variables

All the variables that need to be set are instructed in the terraform.tfvars file.

Running the deployment

Once you are in the folder of this repo you can issue the terraform init command such as :

user@penguin:~/bigquery-datacleanroom-main$ terraform init 

Then do a terraform plan to verify all dependencies and environment variables have been met :

user@penguin:~/bigquery-datacleanroom-main$ terraform plan 

You can then launch the actual deployment using the terraform apply command

user@penguin:~/bigquery-datacleanroom-main$ terraform apply -auto-approve 

Using the models

Generative AI

Once deployed, you should have in your Bigquery Studio environment a view in thelook dataset (depending on the name you gave in your variables) called _genai_product_description.

You can then execute a SQL query against this view such as :

SELECT
  *
FROM
  `thelook._genai_product_description`

This will display a table in the Query Results section with a column named ml_generate_text_llm_result with the description generated by the LLM, based ont the product's Brand, Category and Name. A description can resemble this :

Introducing the Calvin Klein Women's 2 Pocket Collar Blouse, a sophisticated and versatile addition to your wardrobe. Crafted from high-quality fabric, this blouse offers both comfort and style. The classic collar and two functional pockets add a touch of elegance and practicality. Available in a range of sizes, this blouse is perfect for any occasion, whether it's a casual day out or a formal event. Elevate your look with Calvin Klein and experience the epitome of modern fashion.

You can also observe that this section has deployed an external connection to VertexAI as well as a Model called bison_model in your dataset. Read from this Google Cloud Bigquery ML Tutorial for more information on the Generative AI feature.

Clustering

You should have a in the Models section of your dataset a model called sales_segments. When Navigating in the model's Evaluation section you should see your features with the Country, Brand and Category such as :

For more information on k-means, please refer to the Google Cloud documentation.

Product recommendation

Please note that in order to use Matrix Factorization, you need a Bigquery slot reservation of Enterprise Edition. You can create one temporarily and delete it after testing. Beware to create it in the location where your queries will be executed.

To test your recommendation engine, you can issue a SQL query such as:

SELECT
  *
FROM
  ML.PREDICT(MODEL `thelook.users_recommendation`,
    (
    SELECT
      u.email AS user,
      p.brand AS item,
      SUM(o.num_of_item) AS rating
    FROM
      `thelook.order_items` AS i
    JOIN
      `thelook.orders` AS o
    ON
      i.order_id = o.order_id
    JOIN
      `thelook.products` AS p
    ON
      i.product_id = p.id
    JOIN
      `thelook.users` AS u
    ON
      u.id = i.user_id
    GROUP BY
      1,
      2 ))
ORDER BY
  predicted_rating DESC;        

This will add a new column to your dataset called predicted_rating. It displays a float ranking the inclination of a given user to buy a certain Brand. This predicted_rating is different from the rating as it will factor in how other users behaved in their Brand purchases.

If you want to investigate on all orders passed by a given user to analyse the rating against the predicted_rating you can issue a sql query such as :

SELECT
  u.email,
  p.brand,
  p.category,
  o.num_of_item,
  o.order_id,
  i.product_id,
  p.name,
  p.retail_price,
  SUM(i.sale_price*o.num_of_item) AS Sales_sum
FROM
  `thelook.order_items` AS i
JOIN
  `thelook.orders` AS o
ON
  i.order_id = o.order_id
JOIN
  `thelook.products` AS p
ON
  i.product_id = p.id
JOIN
  `thelook.users` AS u
ON
  u.id = i.user_id

WHERE email = "[email protected]"
GROUP BY 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

Troubleshooting & known issues

You will probably notice a failure upon initial deployment with setting IAM permissions for the public dataset to be copied to your project. This is because the IAM API from Google Cloud is async and "eventually consistent". The best way to fix this is to wait a couple minutes and launch the terraform apply command again. You can also view the logs of the transfer page in the Run History tab. Once the transfer is finished, you should run the terraform apply command again in order for the deployment to continue.

When running terraform destroy you will notice that the datasets in BigQuery prevent you from cleaning the projects. You can delete the datasets from the cloud console and launch the terraform destroy command again.