Once a predictive model is in production, how it can be evaluated?
This is in fact a very good question.
The answer is simple, but depends on the case.
In general, what we do after pushing a model to production we apply an audit process. Let me explain: in reality machine learning models that are being pushed to production are pushed to replace another process (e.g, manual process- this is the case of automation). At the beginning everything predicted by machine learning model are audited through another process (e.g, manual), we call this stage the pilot stage. By comparing the model performance to the manual process we establish the quality of the model. Once we are happy, we start reducing the audit percentage from 100% to 5% or so ( there is some math behind what should be the audit percentage). This audit will never go away and will always be used to measure the performance of the model and to establish ground truth data for new samples that can be added to the training set.
In fact, training models in theory is something and using them in production is something else. It is really a complex process. Just to mention: we also like to implement some protection mechanisms to protect the model. For example data drift detection, uncertainty detection and so on.