Lakehouse Streaming for Intelligent Decision Systems
Keywords:
Real-time data pipelines, Azure Databricks, PySpark, streaming, online feature store, micro-batching, anomaly detection, decision systems.Abstract
Real-time data engineering pipelines play a pivotal role in acquiring, processing, and analyzing streaming data to support intelligent decision-making systems. Taking a practical approach, this work examines real-time data pipelines within the Azure Databricks platform using PySpark. It presents a set of foundational concepts alongside a flexible implementation framework to guide the design of real-time data technology workloads. Empirical breadth and repeatability are demonstrated through educational data sources and case studies that showcase working applications of real-time technologies for monitoring and controlling business processes — including anomaly detection in streaming financial indicators and dynamic pricing strategies.
Intelligent decision systems draw on theories and technologies from a range of disciplines, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Data Mining, Decision Support Systems (DSS), and Operations Research (OR). Within the Digital Business and Technology domain, real-time data engineering pipelines address the acquisition, processing, and analysis of streaming data to enable data-driven decisions grounded in a company's current business environment. Notably, most intelligent decision systems emphasize the data-driven component of decision-making more than the decision engine itself. Building on this, the following discussion centers on a Digital Business and Technology use case for designing an intelligent decision system — integrating both data engineering and data science aspects of data-driven decision-making — and implementing a series of real-time data technology workloads in Azure Databricks using PySpark.
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Data Availability Statement
The datasets analyzed in this study are publicly available, including the European Credit Card Fraud Detection dataset and the New York City Taxi Trips dataset. No new data were generated in this study.