MLS-C01 Practice Exam Questions with Answers AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Certification

 The best strategy to identify fraudulent accounts is to create a FindMatches machine learning transform in AWS Glue. The FindMatches transform enables you to identify duplicate or matching records in your dataset, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier and no fields match exactly. This can help you improve fraud detection by finding accounts that are associated with a previously known fraudulent user. You can teach the FindMatches transform your definition of a “duplicate” or a “match” through examples, and it will use machine learning to identify other potential duplicates or matches in your dataset. You can then use the FindMatches transform in your AWS Glue ETL jobs to cleanse your data.

Option A is incorrect because there is no built-in FindDuplicates Amazon Athena query. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. However, Amazon Athena does not provide a predefined query to find duplicate records in a dataset. You would have to write your own SQL query to perform this task, which might not be as effective or accurate as using the FindMatches transform.

Option C is incorrect because creating an AWS Glue crawler to infer duplicate accounts in the source data is not a valid strategy. An AWS Glue crawler is a program that connects to a data store, progresses through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for your data, and then creates metadata tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. A crawler does not perform any data cleansing or record matching tasks.

Option D is incorrect because searching for duplicate accounts in the AWS Glue Data Catalog is not a feasible strategy. The AWS Glue Data Catalog is a central repository to store structural and operational metadata for your data assets. The Data Catalog does not store the actual data, but rather the metadata that describes where the data is located, how it is formatted, and what it contains. Therefore, you cannot search for duplicate records in the Data Catalog.

Record matching with AWS Lake Formation FindMatches - AWS Glue

Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3

AWS Glue Crawlers - AWS Glue

AWS Glue Data Catalog - AWS Glue

 The engineer should create a private workforce and manifest file, and then create a labeling job by using the built-in bounding box task type in Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth. This will allow the engineer to build the labeling pipeline with the least effort.

A private workforce is a group of workers that you manage and who have access to your labeling tasks. You can use a private workforce to label sensitive data that requires confidentiality, such as medical images. You can create a private workforce by using Amazon Cognito and inviting workers by email. You can also use AWS Single Sign-On or your own authentication system to manage your private workforce.

A manifest file is a JSON file that lists the Amazon S3 locations of your input data. You can use a manifest file to specify the data objects that you want to label in your labeling job. You can create a manifest file by using the AWS CLI, the AWS SDK, or the Amazon SageMaker console.

A labeling job is a process that sends your input data to workers for labeling. You can use the Amazon SageMaker console to create a labeling job and choose from several built-in task types, such as image classification, text classification, semantic segmentation, and bounding box. A bounding box task type allows workers to draw boxes around objects in an image and assign labels to them. This is suitable for object detection tasks, such as identifying areas of concern on CT scans.

Create and Manage Workforces - Amazon SageMaker

Use Input and Output Data - Amazon SageMaker

Create a Labeling Job - Amazon SageMaker

Bounding Box Task Type - Amazon SageMaker

The solution C modifies the HPO configuration to use a logarithmic scale for the learning rate parameter. This means that the values of the learning rate are sampled from a log-uniform distribution, which gives more weight to smaller values. This can help to explore the lower end of the range more evenly and find the optimal learning rate more efficiently. The other solutions either use a linear scale, which may not sample enough values from the lower end, or divide the range into sub-intervals, which may miss some combinations of hyperparameters. References:

How Hyperparameter Tuning Works - Amazon SageMaker

Tuning Hyperparameters - Amazon SageMaker

Multiple imputation is a technique that uses machine learning to generate multiple plausible values for each missing value in a dataset, based on the observed data and the relationships among the variables. Multiple imputation preserves the integrity of the dataset by accounting for the uncertainty and variability of the missing data, and avoids the bias and loss of information that may result from other methods, such as listwise deletion, last observation carried forward, or mean substitution. Multiple imputation can improve the accuracy and validity of statistical analysis and machine learning models that use the imputed dataset. References:

Managing missing values in your target and related datasets with automated imputation support in Amazon Forecast

Imputation by feature importance (IBFI): A methodology to impute missing data in large datasets

Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) Explained

To capture word context and sequential QA information, the embedding vectors need to consider both the order and the meaning of the words in the text.

Option B, Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Skip-gram mode, is a valid option because it can learn word embeddings that capture the semantic similarity and syntactic relations between words based on their co-occurrence in a window of words. Skip-gram mode can also handle rare words better than continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) mode1.

Option E, combination of the Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Batch Skip-gram mode with a custom recurrent neural network (RNN), is another valid option because it can leverage the advantages of Skip-gram mode and also use an RNN to model the sequential nature of the text. An RNN can capture the temporal dependencies and long-term dependencies between words, which are important for QA tasks2.

Option A, Amazon SageMaker seq2seq algorithm, is not a valid option because it is designed for sequence-to-sequence tasks such as machine translation, summarization, or chatbots. It does not produce embedding vectors for text series, but rather generates an output sequence given an input sequence3.

Option C, Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec algorithm, is not a valid option because it is designed for learning embeddings for pairs of objects, such as text-image, text-text, or image-image. It does not produce embedding vectors for text series, but rather learns a similarity function between pairs of objects4.

Option D, Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) mode, is not a valid option because it does not capture word context as well as Skip-gram mode. CBOW mode predicts a word given its surrounding words, while Skip-gram mode predicts the surrounding words given a word. CBOW mode is faster and more suitable for frequent words, but Skip-gram mode can learn more meaningful embeddings for rare words1.

1: Amazon SageMaker BlazingText

2: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

3: Amazon SageMaker Seq2Seq

4: Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec

The solution C will meet the requirements with the least development effort because it uses Amazon Rekognition and AWS CloudTrail, which are fully managed services that can provide the desired functionality. The solution C involves the following steps:

Use Amazon Rekognition to identify celebrities in the pictures. Amazon Rekognition is a service that can analyze images and videos and extract insights such as faces, objects, scenes, emotions, and more. Amazon Rekognition also provides a feature called Celebrity Recognition, which can recognize thousands of celebrities across a number of categories, such as politics, sports, entertainment, and media. Amazon Rekognition can return the name, face, and confidence score of the recognized celebrities, as well as additional information such as URLs and biographies1.

Use AWS CloudTrail to capture IP address and timestamp details. AWS CloudTrail is a service that can record the API calls and events made by or on behalf of AWS accounts. AWS CloudTrail can provide information such as the source IP address, the user identity, the request parameters, and the response elements of the API calls. AWS CloudTrail can also deliver the event records to an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon CloudWatch Logs group for further analysis and auditing2.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Using AWS Panorama to identify celebrities in the pictures and using AWS CloudTrail to capture IP address and timestamp details will not meet the requirements effectively. AWS Panorama is a service that can extend computer vision to the edge, where it can run inference on video streams from cameras and other devices. AWS Panorama is not designed for identifying celebrities in pictures, and it may not provide accurate or relevant results. Moreover, AWS Panorama requires the use of an AWS Panorama Appliance or a compatible device, which may incur additional costs and complexity3.

Option B: Using AWS Panorama to identify celebrities in the pictures and making calls to the AWS Panorama Device SDK to capture IP address and timestamp details will not meet the requirements effectively, for the same reasons as option A. Additionally, making calls to the AWS Panorama Device SDK will require more development effort than using AWS CloudTrail, as it will involve writing custom code and handling errors and exceptions4.

Option D: Using Amazon Rekognition to identify celebrities in the pictures and using the text detection feature to capture IP address and timestamp details will not meet the requirements effectively. The text detection feature of Amazon Rekognition is used to detect and recognize text in images and videos, such as street names, captions, product names, and license plates. It is not suitable for capturing IP address and timestamp details, as these are not part of the pictures that users upload. Moreover, the text detection feature may not be accurate or reliable, as it depends on the quality and clarity of the text in the images and videos5.

1: Amazon Rekognition Celebrity Recognition

2: AWS CloudTrail Overview

3: AWS Panorama Overview

4: AWS Panorama Device SDK

5: Amazon Rekognition Text Detection

To enable the Amazon SageMaker service without enabling direct internet access to Amazon SageMaker notebook instances, the company should create Amazon SageMaker VPC interface endpoints within the corporate VPC. A VPC interface endpoint is a gateway that enables private connections between the VPC and supported AWS services without requiring an internet gateway, a NAT device, a VPN connection, or an AWS Direct Connect connection. The instances in the VPC do not need to connect to the public internet in order to communicate with the Amazon SageMaker service. The VPC interface endpoint connects the VPC directly to the Amazon SageMaker service using AWS PrivateLink, which ensures that the traffic between the VPC and the service does not leave the AWS network1.

1: Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker

To access an Amazon S3 bucket in another account that is encrypted using SSE-KMS, the following are required:

A. An AWS KMS key policy that allows access to the customer master key (CMK). The CMK is the encryption key that is used to encrypt and decrypt the data in the S3 bucket. The KMS key policy defines who can use and manage the CMK. To allow access to the CMK from another account, the key policy must include a statement that grants the necessary permissions (such as kms:Decrypt) to the principal from the other account (such as the SageMaker notebook IAM role).

B. A SageMaker notebook security group that allows access to Amazon S3. A security group is a virtual firewall that controls the inbound and outbound traffic for the SageMaker notebook instance. To allow the notebook instance to access the S3 bucket, the security group must have a rule that allows outbound traffic to the S3 endpoint on port 443 (HTTPS).

C. An IAM role that allows access to the specific S3 bucket. An IAM role is an identity that can be assumed by the SageMaker notebook instance to access AWS resources. The IAM role must have a policy that grants the necessary permissions (such as s3:GetObject) to access the specific S3 bucket. The policy must also include a condition that allows access to the CMK in the other account.

The following are not required or correct:

D. A permissive S3 bucket policy. A bucket policy is a resource-based policy that defines who can access the S3 bucket and what actions they can perform. A permissive bucket policy is not required and not recommended, as it can expose the bucket to unauthorized access. A bucket policy should follow the principle of least privilege and grant the minimum permissions necessary to the specific principals that need access.

E. An S3 bucket owner that matches the notebook owner. The S3 bucket owner and the notebook owner do not need to match, as long as the bucket owner grants cross-account access to the notebook owner through the KMS key policy and the bucket policy (if applicable).

F. A SegaMaker notebook subnet ACL that allow traffic to Amazon S3. A subnet ACL is a network access control list that acts as an optional layer of security for the SageMaker notebook instance’s subnet. A subnet ACL is not required to access the S3 bucket, as the security group is sufficient to control the traffic. However, if a subnet ACL is used, it must not block the traffic to the S3 endpoint.

The company wants to predict the demand for a new product that will soon be launched, based on the sales history of similar products. This is a time series forecasting problem, which requires a machine learning algorithm that can learn from historical data and generate future predictions.

One of the most suitable solutions for this problem is to use the Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm, which is a supervised learning algorithm for forecasting scalar time series using recurrent neural networks (RNN). DeepAR can handle multiple related time series, such as the sales of different products, and learn a global model that captures the common patterns and trends across the time series. DeepAR can also generate probabilistic forecasts that provide confidence intervals and quantify the uncertainty of the predictions.

DeepAR can outperform traditional forecasting methods, such as ARIMA, especially when the dataset contains hundreds or thousands of related time series. DeepAR can also use the trained model to forecast the demand for new products that are similar to the ones it has been trained on, by using the categorical features that encode the product attributes. For example, the company can use the product type, brand, flavor, size, and price as categorical features to group the products and learn the typical behavior for each group.

Therefore, the Machine Learning Specialist should apply the Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm to forecast the demand for the new product, by using the sales history of the existing products as the training dataset, and the product attributes as the categorical features.

DeepAR Forecasting Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Now available in Amazon SageMaker: DeepAR algorithm for more accurate time series forecasting

A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a type of deep learning model that can learn to extract features from images and perform tasks such as classification, segmentation, and detection1. ResNet is a popular CNN architecture that uses residual connections to overcome the problem of vanishing gradients and enable very deep networks2. For the task of predicting product quality based on sensor data, a CNN and ResNet approach can leverage the spatial structure of the data and learn complex patterns that distinguish different quality levels.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs / ConvNets)

PyTorch ResNet: The Basics and a Quick Tutorial

The data sources that the data scientist should use to augment the dataset of reviews are those that contain relevant and diverse customer feedback about the company or its products. Emails exchanged by customers and the company’s customer service agents can provide valuable insights into the issues and complaints that customers have, as well as the solutions and responses that the company offers. Social media posts containing the name of the company or its products can capture the opinions and sentiments of customers and potential customers, as well as their reactions to marketing campaigns and product launches. A publicly available collection of customer reviews can provide a large and varied sample of feedback from different online platforms and marketplaces, which can help to generalize the ML models and avoid bias.

Detect sentiment from customer reviews using Amazon Comprehend | AWS Machine Learning Blog

How to Apply Machine Learning to Customer Feedback

The input mode for the training job determines how the training data is transferred from Amazon S3 to the SageMaker instance. There are two input modes: File and Pipe. File mode copies the entire training dataset from S3 to the local file system of the instance before starting the training job. This can cause a long delay before the training job launches, especially if the dataset is large. Pipe mode streams the data from S3 to the instance as the training job runs. This can reduce the startup time and improve the I/O throughput, as the data is read in smaller batches. Therefore, to address the performance issues with the current solution, the Specialist should ensure that the input mode for the training job is set to Pipe. This can be done by using the SageMaker Python SDK and setting the input_mode parameter to Pipe when creating the estimator or the fit method12. Alternatively, this can be done by using the AWS CLI and setting the InputMode parameter to Pipe when creating the training job3.

Access Training Data - Amazon SageMaker

Choosing Data Input Mode Using the SageMaker Python SDK - Amazon SageMaker

CreateTrainingJob - Amazon SageMaker Service

 To use a custom algorithm in Amazon SageMaker, the Docker container image must have an executable file named train that acts as the ENTRYPOINT for the container. This file is responsible for running the training code and communicating with the Amazon SageMaker service. The train file must be in the PATH of the container and have execute permissions. The other options are not valid ways to package the Docker container for Amazon SageMaker. References:

Use Docker containers to build models - Amazon SageMaker

Create a container with your own algorithms and models - Amazon SageMaker

 Based on the model evaluation results, this is a viable model for production because the model is 86% accurate and the cost incurred by the company as a result of false positives is less than the false negatives. The accuracy of the model is the proportion of correct predictions out of the total predictions, which can be calculated by adding the true positives and true negatives and dividing by the total number of observations. In this case, the accuracy of the model is (10 + 76) / 100 = 0.86, which means that the model correctly predicted 86% of the customers’ churn status. The cost incurred by the company as a result of false positives and false negatives is the loss or damage that the company suffers when the model makes incorrect predictions. A false positive is when the model predicts that a customer will churn, but the customer actually does not churn. A false negative is when the model predicts that a customer will not churn, but the customer actually churns. In this case, the cost of a false positive is the incentive that the company offers to the customer who is predicted to churn, which is a relatively low cost. The cost of a false negative is the revenue that the company loses when the customer churns, which is a relatively high cost. Therefore, the cost of a false positive is less than the cost of a false negative, and the company would prefer to have more false positives than false negatives. The model has 10 false positives and 4 false negatives, which means that the company’s cost is lower than if the model had more false negatives and fewer false positives.

 A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a model evaluation technique that can be used to understand how different classification thresholds will impact the model’s performance. A ROC curve plots the true positive rate (TPR) against the false positive rate (FPR) for various values of the classification threshold. The TPR, also known as sensitivity or recall, is the proportion of positive instances that are correctly classified as positive. The FPR, also known as the fall-out, is the proportion of negative instances that are incorrectly classified as positive. A ROC curve can show the trade-off between the TPR and the FPR for different thresholds, and help the Machine Learning Specialist to select the optimal threshold that maximizes the TPR and minimizes the FPR. A ROC curve can also be used to compare the performance of different models by calculating the area under the curve (AUC), which is a measure of how well the model can distinguish between the positive and negative classes. A higher AUC indicates a better model

Recall and precision are two metrics that can be used to evaluate the performance of a classification model. Recall is the ratio of true positives to the total number of actual positives, which measures how well the model can identify all the relevant cases. Precision is the ratio of true positives to the total number of predicted positives, which measures how accurate the model is when it makes a positive prediction. Based on the confusion matrix in the image, we can calculate the recall and precision as follows:

Recall = TP / (TP + FN) = 12 / (12 + 1) = 0.92

Precision = TP / (TP + FP) = 12 / (12 + 3) = 0.8

Where TP is the number of true positives, FN is the number of false negatives, and FP is the number of false positives. Therefore, the recall and precision of the model are 0.92 and 0.8, respectively.

 Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that can analyze text and extract insights such as sentiment, entities, topics, and language. Amazon Comprehend also provides custom classification and custom entity recognition features that allow users to train their own models using their own data and labels. For the scenario of routing customer claims to different queues based on categories, Amazon Comprehend custom classification is a suitable solution. The custom classifier can be trained using a .csv file that contains the claim text and the claim label as columns. The custom classifier can then be used to process incoming claims and predict the labels using the Amazon Comprehend API. The predicted labels can be used to route the claims to the appropriate queue. This solution does not require any machine learning expertise or model deployment, and it can be easily integrated with the existing application.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec is an algorithm that can learn embeddings of objects such as words, sentences, or documents. It can be used for tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, or recommendation systems. However, using this algorithm requires machine learning expertise and model deployment using SageMaker, which are not available for the company.

Option B: Amazon SageMaker Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is an algorithm that can discover the topics or themes in a collection of documents. It can be used for tasks such as topic modeling, document clustering, or text summarization. However, using this algorithm requires machine learning expertise and model deployment using SageMaker, which are not available for the company. Moreover, LDA does not provide labels for the topics, but rather a distribution of words for each topic, which may not match the existing categories of the claims.

Option C: Amazon Textract is a service that can extract text and data from scanned documents or images. It can be used for tasks such as document analysis, data extraction, or form processing. However, using this service is unnecessary and inefficient for the scenario, since the company already has the claim text and label in a database. Moreover, Amazon Textract does not provide custom classification features, so it cannot be used to train a custom classifier using the existing data and labels.

Amazon Comprehend Custom Classification

Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec

Amazon SageMaker Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Amazon Textract

XGBoost is a machine learning framework that can be used for classification, regression, ranking, and other tasks. It is based on the gradient boosting algorithm, which builds an ensemble of weak learners (usually decision trees) to produce a strong learner. XGBoost has several advantages over other algorithms, such as scalability, parallelization, regularization, and sparsity handling. For categorizing new products using the provided dataset, an XGBoost model would be a suitable choice, because it can handle multiple features and multiple classes efficiently and accurately. To train an XGBoost model for multi-class classification, the objective parameter should be set to multi: softmax, which means that the model will output a probability distribution over the classes and predict the class with the highest probability. Alternatively, the objective parameter can be set to multi: softprob, which means that the model will output the raw probability of each class instead of the predicted class label. This can be useful for evaluating the model performance or for post-processing the predictions. References:

XGBoost: A tutorial on how to use XGBoost with Amazon SageMaker.

XGBoost Parameters: A reference guide for the parameters of XGBoost.

SageMaker Data Wrangler provides a built-in Data Quality and Insights Report, which can analyze datasets and provide insights such as:

Missing values

Invalid entries

Column statistics

Outlier detection

“Data Wrangler's Data Quality and Insights Report helps you detect and understand data quality issues including missing values, invalid data types, and outliers.”

Leaving the data in .csv format avoids unnecessary transformation steps and reduces operational complexity. Simply importing the file and generating the report offers a low-effort, effective solution.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. It can analyze text documents and identify the key topics, entities, sentiments, languages, and more. In this case, Amazon Comprehend can be used with the transcribed files from Amazon Transcribe to extract the main topics that are being discussed by the call operators. This can help to understand the common issues and concerns of the customers, and provide insights for further analysis and improvement. References:

Amazon Comprehend - Amazon Web Services

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Sample Questions

 The best way to securely access data stored in a specific Amazon S3 bucket from an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance is to attach a policy to the IAM role associated with the notebook that allows GetObject, PutObject, and ListBucket operations to the specific S3 bucket. This way, the notebook can use the AWS SDK or CLI to access the S3 bucket without exposing any credentials or requiring any additional configuration. This is also the recommended approach by AWS for granting access to S3 from SageMaker. References:

Amazon SageMaker Roles

Accessing Amazon S3 from a SageMaker Notebook Instance

Since false positives (identifying healthy patients as having the disease) increase costs, the key is to reduce false positives, which is captured by high precision. Precision measures how many positive predictions are actually correct.

From AWS documentation:

“Precision is the ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to the total predicted positive observations. Precision is a good measure to determine when the costs of false positives are high.”

— AWS ML Exam Guide – Evaluation Metrics

 To meet the requirements with the least operational overhead, the company should use AWS Glue crawlers, AWS Glue workflows and jobs, and Amazon Fraud Detector. AWS Glue crawlers can scan the data in Amazon S3 and identify the schema, which is then stored in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. AWS Glue workflows and jobs can perform data transformations on the data in Amazon S3 using serverless Spark or Python scripts. Amazon Fraud Detector can train a model to detect fraud using the transformed data and the company’s historical fraud labels, and then generate fraud predictions using a simple API call.

Option A is incorrect because Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that can analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, but it does not perform data transformations or fraud detection.

Option C is incorrect because Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse that can store and query data using SQL, but it requires provisioning and managing clusters, which adds operational overhead. Moreover, Amazon Redshift does not provide a built-in fraud detection capability.

Option E is incorrect because Amazon Redshift ML is a feature that allows users to create, train, and deploy machine learning models using SQL commands in Amazon Redshift. However, using Amazon Redshift ML would require loading the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Redshift, which adds complexity and cost. Also, Amazon Redshift ML does not support fraud detection as a use case.

AWS Glue Crawlers

AWS Glue Workflows and Jobs

Amazon Fraud Detector

 Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a metric that measures the performance of a binary classifier across all possible thresholds. It is also known as the probability that a randomly chosen positive example will be ranked higher than a randomly chosen negative example by the classifier. AUC is a good metric to compare different classification models because it is independent of the class distribution and the decision threshold. It also captures both the sensitivity (true positive rate) and the specificity (true negative rate) of the model. References:

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Sample Questions

The algorithms that are best suited to this scenario are latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and neural topic modeling (NTM), as they are both unsupervised learning methods that can discover abstract topics from a collection of text documents. LDA and NTM can provide a list of the top words for each topic, as well as the topic distribution for each document, which can help the auditors assess the relevance and priority of the topic12.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option B: A random forest classifier is a supervised learning method that can perform classification or regression tasks by using an ensemble of decision trees. A random forest classifier is not suitable for discovering abstract topics from text documents, as it requires labeled data and predefined classes3.

Option D: A linear support vector machine is a supervised learning method that can perform classification or regression tasks by using a linear function that separates the data into different classes. A linear support vector machine is not suitable for discovering abstract topics from text documents, as it requires labeled data and predefined classes4.

Option E: A linear regression is a supervised learning method that can perform regression tasks by using a linear function that models the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. A linear regression is not suitable for discovering abstract topics from text documents, as it requires labeled data and a continuous output variable5.

1: Latent Dirichlet Allocation

2: Neural Topic Modeling

3: Random Forest Classifier

4: Linear Support Vector Machine

5: Linear Regression

Overfitting occurs when a model performs well on the training data but poorly on the test data. This is often because the model has learned the training data too well and is not able to generalize to new data. To avoid overfitting, the Machine Learning Specialist should lower the max_depth parameter value. This will reduce the complexity of the model and make it less likely to overfit. According to the XGBoost documentation1, the max_depth parameter controls the maximum depth of a tree and lower values can help prevent overfitting. The documentation also suggests other ways to control overfitting, such as adding randomness, using regularization, and using early stopping1. References:

XGBoost Parameters

In Amazon SageMaker, hyperparameter tuning jobs optimize model performance by adjusting hyperparameters. Amazon SageMaker’s hyperparameter tuning supports completion criteria settings that enable efficient management of tuning resources. In this scenario, the ML specialist aims to set a completion criterion that will terminate the tuning job as soon as SageMaker detects that further improvements in the objective metric are unlikely to exceed 1%.

The CompleteOnConvergence setting is designed for such requirements. This criterion enables the tuning job to automatically stop when SageMaker determines that additional hyperparameter evaluations are unlikely to improve the objective metric beyond a certain threshold, allowing for efficient tuning completion. The convergence process relies on an internal optimization algorithm that continuously evaluates the objective metric during tuning and stops when performance stabilizes without further improvement.

This is supported by AWS documentation, which explains that CompleteOnConvergence is an efficient way to manage tuning by stopping unnecessary evaluations once the model performance stabilizes within the specified threshold.

The best solution for this scenario is to use a multi-model endpoint in Amazon SageMaker, which allows hosting multiple models on the same endpoint and invoking them dynamically at runtime. This way, the company can reduce the operational overhead of managing multiple EC2 instances and model servers, and leverage the scalability, security, and performance of SageMaker hosting services. By using a multi-model endpoint, the company can also save on hosting costs by improving endpoint utilization and paying only for the models that are loaded in memory and the API calls that are made. To use a multi-model endpoint, the company needs to prepare a Docker container based on the open-source multi-model server, which is a framework-agnostic library that supports loading and serving multiple models from Amazon S3. The company can then create a multi-model endpoint in SageMaker, pointing to the S3 bucket containing all the models, and invoke the endpoint from the web client at runtime, specifying the TargetModel parameter according to the city of each request. This solution also enables the company to add or remove models from the S3 bucket without redeploying the endpoint, and to use different versions of the same model for different cities if needed. References:

Use Docker containers to build models

Host multiple models in one container behind one endpoint

Multi-model endpoints using Scikit Learn

Multi-model endpoints using XGBoost

 The F1 score is a measure of the harmonic mean of precision and recall, which are both important for fraud detection. Precision is the ratio of true positives to all predicted positives, and recall is the ratio of true positives to all actual positives. A high F1 score indicates that the classifier can correctly identify fraudulent transactions and avoid false negatives. The true positive rate is another name for recall, and it measures the proportion of fraudulent transactions that are correctly detected by the classifier. A high true positive rate means that the classifier can capture as many fraudulent transactions as possible.

Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning | Implementations | AWS Solutions

Detect fraudulent transactions using machine learning with Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

1. Introduction — Reproducible Machine Learning for Credit Card Fraud Detection

The best way to visualize the model’s degradation is to create a histogram of the model errors over the last 3 weeks and compare it with a histogram of the model errors from before that period. A histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of numerical data. It shows how often each value or range of values occurs in the data. A model error is the difference between the actual value and the predicted value. A high model error indicates a poor fit of the model to the data. By comparing the histograms of the model errors, the ML team can see if there is a significant change in the shape, spread, or center of the distribution. This can indicate if the model is underfitting, overfitting, or drifting from the data. A line chart or a scatter plot would not be as effective as a histogram for this purpose, because they do not show the distribution of the errors. A line chart would only show the trend of the errors over time, which may not capture the variability or outliers. A scatter plot would only show the relationship between the errors and another variable, such as daily sales, which may not be relevant or informative for the model’s performance. References:

Histogram - Wikipedia

Model error - Wikipedia

SageMaker Model Monitor - visualizing monitoring results

AWS Glue DataBrew provides a no-code data preparation interface that enables business analysts to clean and transform data from various sources, including PostgreSQL databases, without needing programming skills. Amazon SageMaker Canvas offers a no-code interface for machine learning model training and predictions, allowing users to predict future production volume without coding expertise.

This solution meets the requirements efficiently by providing end-to-end data preparation and prediction modeling without requiring coding.

The SageMaker CreatePresignedDomainUrl API is the best option to meet the requirements of the company. This API creates a URL for a specified UserProfile in a Domain. When accessed in a web browser, the user will be automatically signed in to the domain, and granted access to all of the Apps and files associated with the Domain’s Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) volume. This API can only be called when the authentication mode equals IAM, which means the company can use its existing IdP to authenticate users. The company can use the DynamoDB table to store the domain IDs and user profile names for each department, and use the proxy application to query the table and generate the presigned URL for the appropriate domain according to the user’s credentials. The presigned URL is valid only for a specified duration, which can be set by the SessionExpirationDurationInSeconds parameter. This can help enhance the security and prevent unauthorized access to the domains.

The other options are not suitable for the company’s requirements. The SageMaker CreateHumanTaskUi API is used to define the settings for the human review workflow user interface, which is not related to accessing the SageMaker Studio domains. The SageMaker ListHumanTaskUis API is used to return information about the human task user interfaces in the account, which is also not relevant to the company’s use case. The SageMaker CreatePresignedNotebookInstanceUrl API is used to create a URL to connect to the Jupyter server from a notebook instance, which is different from accessing the SageMaker Studio domain.

In cases where survey questions allow multiple choices per question, one-hot encoding is an effective way to represent responses as binary features. Each possible option for each question is transformed into a separate binary column (1 if selected, 0 if not), providing a comprehensive and machine-readable format that logistic regression models can interpret effectively.

This approach ensures that each respondent’s selections are accurately captured in a format suitable for training, offering a straightforward representation for multi-choice responses.

 The best solution for building a line-counting application for use in a quick-service restaurant is to use the following steps:

Build a custom model in Amazon SageMaker to recognize the number of people in an image. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides tools and workflows for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. A custom model can be tailored to the specific use case of line-counting and achieve higher accuracy than a generic model1

Deploy AWS DeepLens cameras in the restaurant to capture video. AWS DeepLens is a wireless video camera that integrates with Amazon SageMaker and AWS Lambda. It can run machine learning inference locally on the device without requiring internet connectivity or streaming video to the cloud. This reduces the bandwidth consumption and latency of the application2

Deploy the model to the cameras. AWS DeepLens allows users to deploy trained models from Amazon SageMaker to the cameras with a few clicks. The cameras can then use the model to process the video frames and count the number of people in each frame2

Deploy an AWS Lambda function to the cameras to use the model to count people and send an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification if the line is too long. AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS DeepLens supports running Lambda functions on the device to perform actions based on the inference results. Amazon SNS is a service that enables users to send notifications to subscribers via email, SMS, or mobile push23

The other options are incorrect because they either require internet connectivity or streaming video to the cloud, which may impact the bandwidth and performance of the application. For example:

Option A uses Amazon Kinesis Video Streams to stream the data to AWS over the restaurant’s existing internet connection. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is a service that enables users to capture, process, and store video streams for analytics and machine learning. However, this option requires streaming multiple video streams to the cloud, which may consume a lot of bandwidth and cause network congestion. It also requires internet connectivity, which may not be reliable or available in some locations4

Option B uses Amazon Rekognition on the AWS DeepLens device. Amazon Rekognition is a service that provides computer vision capabilities, such as face detection, face recognition, and object detection. However, this option requires calling the Amazon Rekognition API over the internet, which may introduce latency and require bandwidth. It also uses a generic face detection model, which may not be optimized for the line-counting use case.

Option C uses Amazon SageMaker to build a custom model and an Amazon SageMaker endpoint to call the model. Amazon SageMaker endpoints are hosted web services that allow users to perform inference on their models. However, this option requires sending the images to the endpoint over the internet, which may consume bandwidth and introduce latency. It also requires internet connectivity, which may not be reliable or available in some locations.

1: Amazon SageMaker – Machine Learning Service - AWS

2: AWS DeepLens - Deep learning enabled video camera - AWS

3: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) - AWS

4: Amazon Kinesis Video Streams - Amazon Web Services

Amazon Rekognition – Video and Image - AWS

Deploy a Model - Amazon SageMaker

The Hyperband tuning strategy is a multi-fidelity based tuning strategy that dynamically reallocates resources to the most promising hyperparameter configurations. Hyperband uses both intermediate and final results of training jobs to stop under-performing jobs and reallocate epochs to well-utilized hyperparameter configurations. Hyperband can provide up to three times faster hyperparameter tuning compared to other strategies1. Setting a lower value for the MaxNumberOfTrainingJobs parameter can also reduce the computation time for the hyperparameter tuning job by limiting the number of training jobs that the tuning job can launch. This can help avoid unnecessary or redundant training jobs that do not improve the objective metric.

The other options are not effective ways to reduce the computation time for the hyperparameter tuning job. Increasing the number of hyperparameters will increase the complexity and dimensionality of the search space, which can result in longer computation time and lower performance. Using the grid search tuning strategy will also increase the computation time, as grid search methodically searches through every combination of hyperparameter values, which can be very expensive and inefficient for large search spaces. Setting a lower value for the MaxParallelTrainingJobs parameter will reduce the number of training jobs that can run in parallel, which can slow down the tuning process and increase the waiting time.

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that can monitor and collect various metrics and logs from AWS resources, such as Amazon SageMaker. Amazon CloudWatch can also generate dashboards to create a single view for the metrics and logs that are of interest. By using Amazon CloudWatch, the Machine Learning Specialist can review the latency, memory utilization, and CPU utilization during the load test, as these are some of the metrics that are outputted by Amazon SageMaker. The Specialist can create a custom dashboard that displays these metrics in different widgets, such as graphs, tables, or text. The dashboard can also be configured to refresh automatically and show the latest data as the load test is running. This approach will allow the Specialist to monitor the performance and resource utilization of the model variant and adjust the Auto Scaling configuration accordingly.

[Monitoring Amazon SageMaker with Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon SageMaker]

[Using Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards - Amazon CloudWatch]

[Create a CloudWatch Dashboard - Amazon CloudWatch]

The problem that the Machine Learning Specialist is facing is likely due to concept drift, which is a phenomenon where the statistical properties of the target variable change over time, making the model less accurate and relevant. Concept drift can occur due to various reasons, such as changes in customer preferences, market trends, product inventory, seasonality, etc. In this case, the product recommendations model may have become outdated as the product inventory changed over time, making the recommendations less appealing to the customers. To address this issue, the model should be periodically retrained using the original training data plus new data as product inventory changes. This way, the model can learn from the latest data and adapt to the changing customer behavior and preferences. Retraining the model from scratch using the original data while adding a regularization term may not be sufficient, as it does not account for the new data. Updating the model’s hyperparameters may not help either, as it does not address the underlying data distribution change. Re-engineering the model completely may not be necessary, as the model may still be valid and useful with periodic retraining.

Concept Drift - Amazon SageMaker

Detecting and Handling Concept Drift - Amazon SageMaker

Machine Learning Concepts - Amazon Machine Learning

Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a metric that is best suited to score the model for the given scenario. AUC is a measure of the performance of a binary classifier, such as a model that predicts whether a credit card transaction is valid or fraudulent. AUC is calculated based on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, which is a plot that shows the trade-off between the true positive rate (TPR) and the false positive rate (FPR) of the classifier as the decision threshold is varied. The TPR, also known as recall or sensitivity, is the proportion of actual positive cases (fraudulent transactions) that are correctly predicted as positive by the classifier. The FPR, also known as the fall-out, is the proportion of actual negative cases (valid transactions) that are incorrectly predicted as positive by the classifier. The ROC curve illustrates how well the classifier can distinguish between the two classes, regardless of the class distribution or the error costs. A perfect classifier would have a TPR of 1 and an FPR of 0 for all thresholds, resulting in a ROC curve that goes from the bottom left to the top left and then to the top right of the plot. A random classifier would have a TPR and an FPR that are equal for all thresholds, resulting in a ROC curve that goes from the bottom left to the top right of the plot along the diagonal line. AUC is the area under the ROC curve, and it ranges from 0 to 1. A higher AUC indicates a better classifier, as it means that the classifier has a higher TPR and a lower FPR for all thresholds. AUC is a useful metric for imbalanced classification problems, such as the credit card transaction dataset, because it is insensitive to the class imbalance and the error costs. AUC can capture the overall performance of the classifier across all possible scenarios, and it can be used to compare different classifiers based on their ROC curves.

The other options are not as suitable as AUC for the given scenario for the following reasons:

Precision: Precision is the proportion of predicted positive cases (fraudulent transactions) that are actually positive. Precision is a useful metric when the cost of a false positive is high, such as in spam detection or medical diagnosis. However, precision is not a good metric for imbalanced classification problems, because it can be misleadingly high when the positive class is rare. For example, a classifier that predicts all transactions as valid would have a precision of 0, but a very high accuracy of 99%. Precision is also dependent on the decision threshold and the error costs, which may vary for different scenarios.

Recall: Recall is the same as the TPR, and it is the proportion of actual positive cases (fraudulent transactions) that are correctly predicted as positive by the classifier. Recall is a useful metric when the cost of a false negative is high, such as in fraud detection or cancer diagnosis. However, recall is not a good metric for imbalanced classification problems, because it can be misleadingly low when the positive class is rare. For example, a classifier that predicts all transactions as fraudulent would have a recall of 1, but a very low accuracy of 1%. Recall is also dependent on the decision threshold and the error costs, which may vary for different scenarios.

Root Mean Square Error (RMSE): RMSE is a metric that measures the average difference between the predicted and the actual values. RMSE is a useful metric for regression problems, where the goal is to predict a continuous value, such as the price of a house or the temperature of a city. However, RMSE is not a good metric for classification problems, where the goal is to predict a discrete value, such as the class label of a transaction. RMSE is not meaningful for classification problems, because it does not capture the accuracy or the error costs of the predictions.

ROC Curve and AUC

How and When to Use ROC Curves and Precision-Recall Curves for Classification in Python

Precision-Recall

Root Mean Squared Error

 The best way to split the dataset into a training and test set for this use case is to randomly select 10% of the users and split off all interaction data from these users for the test set. This is because the company relies on a steady stream of new customers, so the test set should reflect the behavior of new customers who have not been seen by the model before. The other options are not suitable because they either mix old and new customers in the test set (A and B), or they bias the test set towards users with less interaction data ©. References:

Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide: Train and Test Datasets

Amazon Personalize Developer Guide: Preparing and Importing Data

The factors that will adversely impact the performance of the forecast model are:

Sales data is aggregated by week. This will reduce the granularity and resolution of the data, and make it harder to capture the daily patterns and variations in sales volume. The data scientist should request daily sales data from the source database to enable building a daily model, which will be more accurate and useful for the prediction task.

Sales data is missing zero entries for item sales. This will introduce bias and incompleteness in the data, and make it difficult to account for the items that have no demand or are out of stock. The data scientist should request that item sales data from the source database include zero entries to enable building the model, which will be more robust and realistic.

The other options are not valid because:

Detecting seasonality for the majority of stores will not be an issue, as sales data is highly consistent from week to week. Requesting categorical data to relate new stores with similar stores that have more historical data may not improve the model performance significantly, and may introduce unnecessary complexity and noise.

The sales data does not need to have more variance, as it reflects the actual demand and behavior of the customers. Requesting external sales data from other industries will not improve the model’s ability to generalize, but may introduce irrelevant and misleading information.

Only 100 MB of sales data is not a problem, as it is sufficient to train a forecast model with Amazon S3 and Amazon Forecast. Requesting 10 years of sales data will not provide much benefit, as it may contain outdated and obsolete information that does not reflect the current market trends and customer preferences.

Amazon Forecast

Forecasting: Principles and Practice

A stratified k-fold cross-validation strategy is a technique that preserves the class distribution in each fold. This is important for imbalanced datasets, such as the one in the question, where the disease is seen in only 3% of the population. If a random k-fold cross-validation strategy is used, some folds may have no positive cases or very few, which would lead to poor estimates of the model performance. A stratified k-fold cross-validation strategy ensures that each fold has the same proportion of positive and negative cases as the whole dataset, which makes the evaluation more reliable and robust. A k-fold cross-validation strategy with k=5 and 3 repeats is also a possible option, but it is more computationally expensive and may not be necessary if the stratification is done properly. An 80/20 stratified split between training and validation is another option, but it uses less data for training and validation than k-fold cross-validation, which may result in higher variance and lower accuracy of the estimates. References:

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Certification Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training: Model Evaluation

How to Fix k-Fold Cross-Validation for Imbalanced Classification

The elbow method is a technique that we use to determine the number of centroids (k) to use in a k-means clustering algorithm. In this method, we plot the within-cluster sum of squares (WCSS) against the number of clusters (k) and look for the point where the curve bends sharply. This point is called the elbow point and it indicates that adding more clusters does not improve the model significantly. The graph in the question shows that the elbow point is at k = 4, which means that 4 is a reasonable choice for the optimal number of clusters. References:

Elbow Method for optimal value of k in KMeans: A tutorial on how to use the elbow method with Amazon SageMaker.

K-Means Clustering: A video that explains the concept and benefits of k-means clustering.

 A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier is a suitable architecture for image classification tasks, as it can learn features from the images and reduce the dimensionality of the input. A linear output layer that outputs the probability that an image contains a car is appropriate for a binary classification problem, as it can produce a single scalar value between 0 and 1. A softmax output layer is more suitable for a multi-class classification problem, as it can produce a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1. A deep multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier is not as effective as a CNN for image classification, as it does not exploit the spatial structure of the images and requires a large number of parameters to process the high-dimensional input. References:

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS

AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS

The services that are integrated with Amazon SageMaker to track the information that the Machine Learning Specialist needs are AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch. AWS CloudTrail is a service that records the API calls and events for AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker. AWS CloudTrail can track the actions performed by the Data Scientists, such as creating notebooks, training models, and deploying endpoints. AWS CloudTrail can also provide information such as the identity of the user, the time of the action, the parameters used, and the response elements returned. AWS CloudTrail can help the Machine Learning Specialist to monitor the usage and activity of Amazon SageMaker, as well as to audit and troubleshoot any issues1 Amazon CloudWatch is a service that collects and analyzes the metrics and logs for AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker. Amazon CloudWatch can track the performance and utilization of the Amazon SageMaker endpoints, such as the CPU and GPU utilization, the inference latency, the number of invocations, etc. Amazon CloudWatch can also track the errors and alarms that are generated when an endpoint is invoked, such as the model errors, the throttling errors, the HTTP errors, etc. Amazon CloudWatch can help the Machine Learning Specialist to optimize the operational performance and reliability of Amazon SageMaker, as well as to set up notifications and actions based on the metrics and logs

The best solution for encrypting images at rest and in transit, and opting out of data usage for service improvement, is to use the following steps:

Enable server-side encryption on the S3 bucket. This will encrypt the images stored in the bucket using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master keys (CMKs). This will protect the data at rest from unauthorized access1

Submit an AWS Support ticket to opt out of allowing images to be used for improving the service, and follow the process provided by AWS Support. This will prevent AWS from storing or using the images processed by Amazon Rekognition for service development or enhancement purposes. This will protect the data privacy and ownership2

Use HTTPS to call the Amazon Rekognition CompareFaces API operation. This will encrypt the data in transit between the client and the server using SSL/TLS protocols. This will protect the data from interception or tampering3

The other options are incorrect because they either do not encrypt the images at rest or in transit, or do not opt out of data usage for service improvement. For example:

Option B switches to using an Amazon Rekognition collection to store the images. A collection is a container for storing face vectors that are calculated by Amazon Rekognition. It does not encrypt the images at rest or in transit, and it does not opt out of data usage for service improvement. It also requires changing the API operations from CompareFaces to IndexFaces and SearchFacesByImage, which may not have the same functionality or performance4

Option C switches to using the AWS GovCloud (US) Region for Amazon S3 and Amazon Rekognition. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region is an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud. It does not automatically encrypt the images at rest or in transit, and it does not opt out of data usage for service improvement. It also requires migrating the data and the application to a different Region, which may incur additional costs and complexity5

Option D enables client-side encryption on the S3 bucket. This means that the client is responsible for encrypting and decrypting the images before uploading or downloading them from the bucket. This adds extra overhead and complexity to the client application, and it does not encrypt the data in transit when calling the Amazon Rekognition API. It also does not opt out of data usage for service improvement.

1: Protecting Data Using Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS–Managed Keys (SSE-KMS) - Amazon Simple Storage Service

2: Opting Out of Content Storage and Use for Service Improvements - Amazon Rekognition

3: HTTPS - Wikipedia

4: Working with Stored Faces - Amazon Rekognition

5: AWS GovCloud (US) - Amazon Web Services

Protecting Data Using Client-Side Encryption - Amazon Simple Storage Service

Using AWS Glue to catalogue the data and Amazon Athena to run queries is the solution that requires the least effort to be able to query the data stored in an Amazon S3 bucket using SQL. AWS Glue is a service that provides a serverless data integration platform for data preparation and transformation. AWS Glue can automatically discover, crawl, and catalogue the data stored in various sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, etc. AWS Glue can also use AWS KMS to encrypt the data at rest on the Glue Data Catalog and Glue ETL jobs. AWS Glue can handle both structured and unstructured data, and support various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, etc. AWS Glue can also use built-in or custom classifiers to identify and parse the data schema and format1 Amazon Athena is a service that provides an interactive query engine that can run SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Athena can integrate with AWS Glue to use the Glue Data Catalog as a central metadata repository for the data sources and tables. Amazon Athena can also use AWS KMS to encrypt the data at rest on Amazon S3 and the query results. Amazon Athena can query both structured and unstructured data, and support various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, etc. Amazon Athena can also use partitions and compression to optimize the query performance and reduce the query cost23

The other options are not valid or require more effort to query the data stored in an Amazon S3 bucket using SQL. Using AWS Data Pipeline to transform the data and Amazon RDS to run queries is not a good option, as it involves moving the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon RDS, which can incur additional time and cost. AWS Data Pipeline is a service that can orchestrate and automate data movement and transformation across various AWS services and on-premises data sources. AWS Data Pipeline can be integrated with Amazon EMR to run ETL jobs on the data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon RDS is a service that provides a managed relational database service that can run various database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. Amazon RDS can use AWS KMS to encrypt the data at rest and in transit. Amazon RDS can run SQL queries on the data stored in the database tables45 Using AWS Batch to run ETL on the data and Amazon Aurora to run the queries is not a good option, as it also involves moving the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Aurora, which can incur additional time and cost. AWS Batch is a service that can run batch computing workloads on AWS. AWS Batch can be integrated with AWS Lambda to trigger ETL jobs on the data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Aurora is a service that provides a compatible and scalable relational database engine that can run MySQL or PostgreSQL. Amazon Aurora can use AWS KMS to encrypt the data at rest and in transit. Amazon Aurora can run SQL queries on the data stored in the database tables. Using AWS Lambda to transform the data and Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to run queries is not a good option, as it is not suitable for querying data stored in Amazon S3 using SQL. AWS Lambda is a service that can run serverless functions on AWS. AWS Lambda can be integrated with Amazon S3 to trigger data transformation functions on the data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that can analyze streaming data using SQL or Apache Flink. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics can be integrated with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest streaming data sources, such as web logs, social media, IoT devices, etc. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is not designed for querying data stored in Amazon S3 using SQL.

A hyperparameter tuning job is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that allows automatically finding the best combination of hyperparameters for a machine learning model. Hyperparameters are high-level parameters that influence the learning process and the performance of the model, such as the learning rate, the number of layers, the regularization factor, etc. A hyperparameter tuning job works by launching multiple training jobs with different hyperparameters, evaluating the results using an objective metric, and choosing the next set of hyperparameters to try based on a search strategy. The objective metric is a measure of the quality of the model, such as accuracy, precision, recall, etc. The search strategy is a method of exploring the hyperparameter space, such as random search, grid search, or Bayesian optimization.

Among the four options, option C is the most repeatable and requires the least amount of effort to use hyperparameter optimization to increase the model’s accuracy. This option involves the following steps:

Create a hyperparameter tuning job: Amazon SageMaker provides an easy-to-use interface for creating a hyperparameter tuning job, either through the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. To create a hyperparameter tuning job, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to specify the following information:

The name and type of the algorithm to use, either a built-in algorithm or a custom algorithm.

The ranges and types of the hyperparameters to tune, such as categorical, continuous, or integer.

The name and type of the objective metric to optimize, such as accuracy, and whether to maximize or minimize it.

The resource limits for the tuning job, such as the maximum number of training jobs and the maximum parallel training jobs.

The input data channels and the output data location for the training jobs.

The configuration of the training instances, such as the instance type, the instance count, the volume size, etc.

Set the accuracy as an objective metric: To use accuracy as an objective metric, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to ensure that the training algorithm writes the accuracy value to a file called metric_definitions in JSON format and prints it to stdout or stderr. For example, the file can contain the following content:

This means that the training algorithm prints a line like this:

Amazon SageMaker reads the accuracy value from the line and uses it to evaluate and compare the training jobs.

The other options are not as repeatable and require more effort than option C for the following reasons:

Option A: This option requires manually launching multiple training jobs in parallel with different hyperparameters, which can be tedious and error-prone. It also requires manually monitoring and comparing the results of the training jobs, which can be time-consuming and subjective.

Option B: This option requires writing code to create an AWS Step Functions workflow that monitors the accuracy in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and relaunches the training job with a defined list of hyperparameters, which can be complex and challenging. It also requires maintaining and updating the list of hyperparameters, which can be inefficient and suboptimal.

Option D: This option requires writing code to create a random walk in the parameter space to iterate through a range of values that should be used for each individual hyperparameter, which can be unreliable and unpredictable. It also requires defining and implementing a stopping criterion, which can be arbitrary and inconsistent.

Automatic Model Tuning - Amazon SageMaker

Define Metrics to Monitor Model Performance

DeepAR is a supervised algorithm that can leverage historical data from related time series to predict demand for new items, unlike ARIMA which requires sufficient historical data for the new item.

From AWS documentation:

“The DeepAR algorithm is a supervised learning algorithm for forecasting scalar (one-dimensional) time series. It can also forecast demand for new items by learning patterns from similar time series.”

— AWS SageMaker DeepAR documentation

The solution that the agency should consider is to use a proxy server at each local office and for each camera, and stream the RTSP feed to a unique Amazon Kinesis Video Streams video stream. On each stream, use Amazon Rekognition Video and create a stream processor to detect faces from a collection of known employees, and alert when non-employees are detected.

This solution has the following advantages:

It can handle thousands of video cameras in real time, as Amazon Kinesis Video Streams can scale elastically to support any number of producers and consumers1.

It can leverage the Amazon Rekognition Video API, which is designed and optimized for video analysis, and can detect faces in challenging conditions such as low lighting, occlusions, and different poses2.

It can use a stream processor, which is a feature of Amazon Rekognition Video that allows you to create a persistent application that analyzes streaming video and stores the results in a Kinesis data stream3. The stream processor can compare the detected faces with a collection of known employees, which is a container for persisting faces that you want to search for in the input video stream4. The stream processor can also send notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) when non-employees are detected, which can trigger downstream actions such as sending alerts or storing the events in Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES)3.

1: What Is Amazon Kinesis Video Streams? - Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

2: Detecting and Analyzing Faces - Amazon Rekognition

3: Using Amazon Rekognition Video Stream Processor - Amazon Rekognition

4: Working with Stored Faces - Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed service that can capture, transform, and load streaming data into AWS data stores, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk. It can also invoke AWS Lambda functions to perform custom transformations on the data. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that can analyze streaming data in real time using SQL or Apache Flink applications. It can also use machine learning algorithms, such as Random Cut Forest (RCF), to perform anomaly detection on streaming data. RCF is an unsupervised learning algorithm that assigns an anomaly score to each data point based on how different it is from the rest of the data. By using Kinesis Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Analytics, the cybersecurity company can ingest the data in real time, score the malicious events as anomalies, and stream the results to Amazon S3, which can serve as a data lake for later processing and analysis. This is the most efficient way to accomplish these tasks, as it does not require any additional infrastructure, coding, or training.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose - Amazon Web Services

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics - Amazon Web Services

Anomaly Detection with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics - Amazon Web Services

[AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Sample Questions]

The company wants to perform near-real time defect detection on a time-series of 200 performance metrics, and store all the data for offline analysis. The best approach for this scenario is to use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for ingestion and Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Random Cut Forest (RCF) to perform anomaly detection. Use Kinesis Data Firehose to store data in Amazon S3 for further analysis.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service that can capture, transform, and deliver streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Splunk. Kinesis Data Firehose can handle any amount and frequency of data, and automatically scale to match the throughput. Kinesis Data Firehose can also compress, encrypt, and batch the data before delivering it to the destination, reducing the storage cost and enhancing the security.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that can analyze streaming data in real time using SQL or Apache Flink applications. Kinesis Data Analytics can use built-in functions and algorithms to perform various analytics tasks, such as aggregations, joins, filters, windows, and anomaly detection. One of the built-in algorithms that Kinesis Data Analytics supports is Random Cut Forest (RCF), which is a supervised learning algorithm for forecasting scalar time series using recurrent neural networks. RCF can detect anomalies in streaming data by assigning an anomaly score to each data point, based on how distant it is from the rest of the data. RCF can handle multiple related time series, such as the performance metrics of the aircraft engine, and learn a global model that captures the common patterns and trends across the time series.

Therefore, the company can use the following architecture to build the near-real time defect detection solution:

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for ingestion: The company can use Kinesis Data Firehose to capture the streaming data from the aircraft engine testing, and deliver it to two destinations: Amazon S3 and Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. The company can configure the Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to specify the source, the buffer size and interval, the compression and encryption options, the error handling and retry logic, and the destination details.

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Random Cut Forest (RCF) to perform anomaly detection: The company can use Kinesis Data Analytics to create a SQL application that can read the streaming data from the Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, and apply the RCF algorithm to detect anomalies. The company can use the RANDOM_CUT_FOREST or RANDOM_CUT_FOREST_WITH_EXPLANATION functions to compute the anomaly scores and attributions for each data point, and use the WHERE clause to filter out the normal data points. The company can also use the CURSOR function to specify the input stream, and the PUMP function to write the output stream to another destination, such as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams or AWS Lambda.

Use Kinesis Data Firehose to store data in Amazon S3 for further analysis: The company can use Kinesis Data Firehose to store the raw and processed data in Amazon S3 for offline analysis. The company can use the S3 destination of the Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to store the raw data, and use another Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to store the output of the Kinesis Data Analytics application. The company can also use AWS Glue or Amazon Athena to catalog, query, and analyze the data in Amazon S3.

What Is Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose?

What Is Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL Applications?

DeepAR Forecasting Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

 Binary classification is a type of supervised learning problem where the goal is to predict a categorical label that has only two possible values, such as Yes or No, True or False, Positive or Negative. In this case, the label is whether a transaction is fraudulent or not, which is a binary outcome. Binary classification can be used to estimate the probability of an observation belonging to a certain class, such as the probability of a transaction being fraudulent. This can help the business to make decisions based on the risk level of each transaction. References:

Binary Classification - Amazon Machine Learning

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Sample Questions

The Data Science team is facing a problem of imbalanced data, where the positive class (paid users) is much less frequent than the negative class (non-paid users). This can cause the random forest model to be biased towards the majority class and have poor performance on the minority class. To mitigate this issue, the Data Science team can try the following approaches:

C. Generate more positive samples by duplicating the positive samples and adding a small amount of noise to the duplicated data. This is a technique called data augmentation, which can help increase the size and diversity of the training data for the minority class. This can help the random forest model learn more features and patterns from the positive class and reduce the imbalance ratio.

D. Change the cost function so that false negatives have a higher impact on the cost value than false positives. This is a technique called cost-sensitive learning, which can assign different weights or costs to different classes or errors. By assigning a higher cost to false negatives (predicting non-paid when the user is actually paid), the random forest model can be more sensitive to the minority class and try to minimize the misclassification of the positive class.

Bagging and Random Forest for Imbalanced Classification

Surviving in a Random Forest with Imbalanced Datasets

machine learning - random forest for imbalanced data? - Cross Validated

Biased Random Forest For Dealing With the Class Imbalance Problem

In predictive maintenance, when a dataset is imbalanced (with far fewer failure cases than non-failure cases), oversampling the minority class helps the model learn from the minority class effectively. The Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) generates synthetic samples for the minority class by creating data points between existing minority class instances. This can enhance the model’s ability to recognize failure patterns, particularly in imbalanced datasets.

SMOTE increases the effective presence of failure cases in the dataset, providing a balanced learning environment for the model. This is more effective than undersampling, which would risk losing important non-failure data.

 The IP Insights algorithm is designed to capture associations between entities and IP addresses, and can be used to identify anomalous IP usage patterns. The algorithm can learn from historical data that contains pairs of entities and IP addresses, and can return a score that indicates how likely the pair is to occur. The company can use this algorithm to train a model that can detect when a customer is accessing the site from a different location than usual, and request additional information accordingly. The company can also schedule updates and retraining of the model using new log data nightly to keep the model up to date with the latest IP usage patterns.

The other options are not suitable for this use case because:

Option A: The factorization machines (FM) algorithm is a general-purpose supervised learning algorithm that can be used for both classification and regression tasks. However, it is not optimized for capturing associations between entities and IP addresses, and would require labeling each record as either a successful or failed access attempt, which is a costly and time-consuming process.

Option C: The IP Insights algorithm is a good choice for this use case, but it does not require labeling each record as either a successful or failed access attempt. The algorithm is unsupervised and can learn from the historical data without labels. Labeling the data would be unnecessary and wasteful.

Option D: The Object2Vec algorithm is a general-purpose neural embedding algorithm that can learn low-dimensional dense embeddings of high-dimensional objects. However, it is not designed to capture associations between entities and IP addresses, and would require a different input format than the one provided by the company. The Object2Vec algorithm expects pairs of objects and their relationship labels or scores as inputs, while the company has data containing the source IP addresses and the login names of the requesting users.

IP Insights - Amazon SageMaker

Factorization Machines Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Object2Vec Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon Rekognition is a service that provides computer vision capabilities for image and video analysis, such as object, scene, and activity detection, face and text recognition, and custom label detection. Amazon Rekognition can be used to automate the quality control process for plaques by comparing the images of the plaques with the images of defects in the Amazon S3 bucket and returning a confidence score for each defect. Amazon A2I is a service that enables human review of machine learning predictions, such as low-confidence predictions from Amazon Rekognition. Amazon A2I can be integrated with a private workforce option, which allows the engraving company to use its own internal team of reviewers to manually inspect the plaques that are flagged by Amazon Rekognition. This solution meets the requirements of automating the quality control process, sending low-confidence predictions to an internal team of reviewers, and using Amazon A2I for manual review. References:

1: Amazon Rekognition documentation

2: Amazon A2I documentation

3: Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels documentation

4: Amazon A2I Private Workforce documentation

 A precision-recall curve is a plot that shows the trade-off between the precision and recall of a binary classifier as the decision threshold is varied. It is a useful tool for evaluating and comparing the performance of different models. To generate a precision-recall curve, the following steps are needed:

Calculate the precision and recall values for different threshold values using the predictions and the true labels of the data.

Plot the precision values on the y-axis and the recall values on the x-axis for each threshold value.

Optionally, calculate the area under the curve (AUC) as a summary metric of the model performance.

Among the four options, option C requires the least coding effort to generate and share a visualization of the daily precision-recall curve from the predictions. This option involves the following steps:

Run a daily Amazon EMR workflow to generate precision-recall data: Amazon EMR is a service that allows running big data frameworks, such as Apache Spark, on a managed cluster of EC2 instances. Amazon EMR can handle large-scale data processing and analysis, such as calculating the precision and recall values for different threshold values from 100 TB of predictions. Amazon EMR supports various languages, such as Python, Scala, and R, for writing the code to perform the calculations. Amazon EMR also supports scheduling workflows using Apache Airflow or AWS Step Functions, which can automate the daily execution of the code.

Save the results in Amazon S3: Amazon S3 is a service that provides scalable, durable, and secure object storage. Amazon S3 can store the precision-recall data generated by Amazon EMR in a cost-effective and accessible way. Amazon S3 supports various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, or Parquet, for storing the data. Amazon S3 also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon QuickSight, for further processing and visualization of the data.

Visualize the arrays in Amazon QuickSight: Amazon QuickSight is a service that provides fast, easy-to-use, and interactive business intelligence and data visualization. Amazon QuickSight can connect to Amazon S3 as a data source and import the precision-recall data into a dataset. Amazon QuickSight can then create a line chart to plot the precision-recall curve from the dataset. Amazon QuickSight also supports calculating the AUC and adding it as an annotation to the chart.

Publish them in a dashboard shared with the Business team: Amazon QuickSight allows creating and publishing dashboards that contain one or more visualizations from the datasets. Amazon QuickSight also allows sharing the dashboards with other users or groups within the same AWS account or across different AWS accounts. The Business team can access the dashboard with read-only permissions and view the daily precision-recall curve from the predictions.

The other options require more coding effort than option C for the following reasons:

Option A: This option requires writing code to plot the precision-recall curve from the data stored in Amazon S3, as well as creating a mechanism to share the plot with the Business team. This can involve using additional libraries or tools, such as matplotlib, seaborn, or plotly, for creating the plot, and using email, web, or cloud services, such as AWS Lambda or Amazon SNS, for sharing the plot.

Option B: This option requires transforming the predictions into a format that Amazon QuickSight can recognize and import as a data source, such as CSV, JSON, or Parquet. This can involve writing code to process and convert the predictions, as well as uploading them to a storage service, such as Amazon S3 or Amazon Redshift, that Amazon QuickSight can connect to.

Option D: This option requires writing code to generate precision-recall data in Amazon ES, as well as creating a dashboard to visualize the data. Amazon ES is a service that provides a fully managed Elasticsearch cluster, which is mainly used for search and analytics purposes. Amazon ES is not designed for generating precision-recall data, and it requires using a specific data format, such as JSON, for storing the data. Amazon ES also requires using a tool, such as Kibana, for creating and sharing the dashboard, which can involve additional configuration and customization steps.

Precision-Recall

What Is Amazon EMR?

What Is Amazon S3?

[What Is Amazon QuickSight?]

[What Is Amazon Elasticsearch Service?]

The solution C will meet the requirements because it uses Amazon SageMaker Spot Instances, which are unused EC2 instances that are available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. Amazon SageMaker Spot Instances can speed up training and lower costs by taking advantage of the spare EC2 capacity. The company does not need to make any code changes to use Spot Instances, as it can simply enable the managed spot training option in the SageMaker training job configuration. The company also does not need to implement model checkpoints, as it is using only one epoch for training, which means the model will not resume from a previous state1.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use Pipe mode instead of File mode will not speed up training or lower costs significantly. Pipe mode is a data ingestion mode that streams data directly from S3 to the training algorithm, without copying the data to the local storage of the training instance. Pipe mode can reduce the startup time of the training job and the disk space usage, but it does not affect the computation time or the instance price. Moreover, Pipe mode may require some code changes to handle the streaming data, depending on the training algorithm2.

Option B: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use FastFile mode instead of File mode will not speed up training or lower costs significantly. FastFile mode is a data ingestion mode that copies data from S3 to the local storage of the training instance in parallel with the training process. FastFile mode can reduce the startup time of the training job and the disk space usage, but it does not affect the computation time or the instance price. Moreover, FastFile mode is only available for distributed training jobs that use multiple instances, which is not the case for the company3.

Option D: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use Spot Instances and implementing model checkpoints will not meet the requirements without the need to make any code changes. Model checkpoints are a feature that allows the training job to save the model state periodically to S3, and resume from the latest checkpoint if the training job is interrupted. Model checkpoints can help to avoid losing the training progress and ensure the model convergence, but they require some code changes to implement the checkpointing logic and the resuming logic4.

1: Managed Spot Training - Amazon SageMaker

2: Pipe Mode - Amazon SageMaker

3: FastFile Mode - Amazon SageMaker

4: Checkpoints - Amazon SageMaker

Collaborative filtering is a machine learning technique that recommends products or services to users based on the ratings or preferences of other users. This technique is well-suited for identifying customer shopping patterns and preferences because it takes into account the interactions between users and products.

To fix the incorrectly skewed data, the Data Scientist can apply two feature transformations: numerical value binning and logarithmic transformation. Numerical value binning is a technique that groups continuous values into discrete bins or categories. This can help reduce the skewness of the data by creating more balanced frequency distributions. Logarithmic transformation is a technique that applies the natural logarithm function to each value in the data. This can help reduce the right skewness of the data by compressing the large values and expanding the small values. Both of these transformations can make the data more suitable for machine learning algorithms that assume normality of the data. References:

Data Transformation - Amazon SageMaker

Transforming Skewed Data for Machine Learning

A prediction power score of 1 indicates that the feature perfectly predicts the target variable, which usually suggests target leakage. Target leakage occurs when the feature includes information that would not be available at prediction time, leading to unrealistic performance.

From AWS documentation:

“Prediction power scores close to 1 might suggest target leakage in your dataset, as the feature may contain information about the target that wouldn’t be available at inference.”

— AWS SageMaker Data Wrangler documentation

The best way to maintain the privacy and integrity of the data stored in Amazon S3 is to use a combination of VPC endpoints and S3 bucket policies. A VPC endpoint allows the SageMaker notebook instance to access the S3 bucket without going through the public internet. A bucket policy allows the S3 bucket owner to specify which VPCs or VPC endpoints can access the bucket. This way, the data is protected from unauthorized access and tampering. The other options are either insecure (A and D) or inefficient (B). References: Using Amazon S3 VPC Endpoints, Using Bucket Policies and User Policies

Option A is correct because reducing the number of features with the SageMaker PCA algorithm can help remove noise and redundancy from the data, and improve the model’s performance. PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that transforms the original features into a smaller set of linearly uncorrelated features called principal components. The SageMaker linear learner algorithm supports PCA as a built-in feature transformation option.

Option E is correct because using the SageMaker k-NN algorithm with a dimension reduction target of less than 1,000 can help the model learn from the similarity of the data points, and improve the model’s performance. k-NN is a non-parametric algorithm that classifies an input based on the majority vote of its k nearest neighbors in the feature space. The SageMaker k-NN algorithm supports dimension reduction as a built-in feature transformation option.

Option B is incorrect because using the scikit-learn MDS algorithm to reduce the number of features is not a feasible option, as MDS is a computationally expensive technique that does not scale well to large datasets. MDS is a dimensionality reduction technique that tries to preserve the pairwise distances between the original data points in a lower-dimensional space.

Option C is incorrect because setting the predictor type to regressor would change the model’s objective from classification to regression, which is not suitable for the given problem. A regressor model would output a continuous value instead of a binary label for each phone.

Option D is incorrect because using the SageMaker k-means algorithm with k of less than 1,000 would not help the model classify the phones, as k-means is a clustering algorithm that groups the data points into k clusters based on their similarity, without using any labels. A clustering model would not output a binary label for each phone.

Amazon SageMaker Linear Learner Algorithm

Amazon SageMaker K-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) Algorithm

[Principal Component Analysis - Scikit-learn]

[Multidimensional Scaling - Scikit-learn]

CNN-QR is a proprietary machine learning algorithm for forecasting time series using causal convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNN-QR works best with large datasets containing hundreds of time series. It accepts item metadata, and is the only Forecast algorithm that accepts related time series data without future values. In this case, the power company has historical power consumption data for the last 10 years, which is a large dataset with multiple time series. The data also includes related data such as weather, number of individuals on the property, and public holidays, which can be used as item metadata or related time series data. Therefore, CNN-QR is the most suitable algorithm for this scenario. References: Amazon Forecast Algorithms, Amazon Forecast CNN-QR

The problem of poor performance on the test data is a sign of overfitting, which means the model has learned the training data too well and failed to generalize to new and unseen data. To correct this, the Machine Learning Specialist should consider using methods that reduce the complexity of the model and increase its ability to generalize. Some of these methods are:

Increase regularization: Regularization is a technique that adds a penalty term to the loss function of the model, which reduces the magnitude of the model weights and prevents overfitting. There are different types of regularization, such as L1, L2, and elastic net, that apply different penalties to the weights1.

Increase dropout: Dropout is a technique that randomly drops out some units or connections in the neural network during training, which reduces the co-dependency of the units and prevents overfitting. Dropout can be applied to different layers of the network, and the dropout rate can be tuned to control the amount of dropout2.

Decrease feature combinations: Feature combinations are the interactions between different input features that can be used to create new features for the model. However, too many feature combinations can increase the complexity of the model and cause overfitting. Therefore, the Specialist should decrease the number of feature combinations and select only the most relevant and informative ones for the model3.

1: Regularization for Deep Learning - Amazon SageMaker

2: Dropout - Amazon SageMaker

3: Feature Engineering - Amazon SageMaker

 The best feature engineering technique to speed up the model training time without losing a lot of information from the original dataset is to use an autoencoder or principal component analysis (PCA) to replace original features with new features. An autoencoder is a type of neural network that learns a compressed representation of the input data, called the latent space, by minimizing the reconstruction error between the input and the output. PCA is a statistical technique that reduces the dimensionality of the data by finding a set of orthogonal axes, called the principal components, that capture the maximum variance of the data. Both techniques can help reduce the number of features and remove the noise and redundancy in the data, which can improve the model performance and speed up the training process. References:

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training - Dimensionality Reduction for Machine Learning

AWS Machine Learning Training - Deep Learning with Amazon SageMaker

Applying L1 regularization encourages sparsity by penalizing weights directly, often driving many weights to zero. In this case, the ML specialist observes that all weights become zero, which suggests that the L1 regularization parameter is set too high. This high value overly penalizes non-zero weights, effectively removing all features from the model.

To improve the model, the ML specialist should reduce the L1 regularization parameter, allowing some features to retain non-zero weights. This adjustment will make the model less prone to excessive sparsity, allowing it to better capture essential patterns in the data without dropping all features. Introducing L2 regularization is another approach but may not directly resolve this specific issue of all-zero weights as effectively as reducing L1.

Linear regression is a machine learning approach that can be used to solve this problem. Linear regression is a supervised learning technique that can model the relationship between one or more input variables (features) and an output variable (target). In this case, the input variables could be the historical sales data of the part, such as the quarter, the demand, the price, the inventory, etc. The output variable could be the number of units to be produced for the part. Linear regression can learn the coefficients (weights) of the input variables that best fit the output variable, and then use them to make predictions for new data. Linear regression is suitable for problems that involve continuous and numeric output variables, such as predicting house prices, stock prices, or sales volumes. References:

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

Linear Regression

Pipe input mode is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that allows streaming large datasets from Amazon S3 directly to the training algorithm without downloading them to the local disk. This reduces the startup time, disk space, and cost of training jobs. Pipe input mode is supported by most of the built-in algorithms and can also be used with custom training algorithms. To use Pipe input mode, the data needs to be in a binary format such as protobuf recordIO or TFRecord. The training code needs to use the PipeModeDataset class to read the data from the named pipe provided by SageMaker. To verify that the training code and the model parameters are working as expected, it is recommended to train locally on a smaller subset of the data before launching a full-scale training job on SageMaker. This approach is faster and more efficient than the other options, which involve either downloading the full dataset to an EC2 instance or using AWS Glue, which is not designed for training machine learning models. References:

Using Pipe input mode for Amazon SageMaker algorithms

Using Pipe Mode with Your Own Algorithms

PipeModeDataset Class

 The solution A will meet the requirements with the most operational efficiency because it uses Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which is a service that simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering for machine learning. The solution A involves the following steps:

Use Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler preconfigured transformations to explore feature transformations. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides a visual interface that allows data scientists to apply various transformations to their tabular data, such as encoding categorical features, scaling numerical features, imputing missing values, and more. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler also supports custom transformations using Python code or SQL queries1.

Use SageMaker Data Wrangler templates for visualization. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler also provides a set of templates that can generate visualizations of the data, such as histograms, scatter plots, box plots, and more. These visualizations can help data scientists to understand the distribution and characteristics of the data, and to compare the effects of different feature transformations1.

Export the feature processing workflow to a SageMaker pipeline for automation. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler can export the feature processing workflow as a SageMaker pipeline, which is a service that orchestrates and automates machine learning workflows. A SageMaker pipeline can run the feature processing steps as a preprocessing step, and then feed the output to a training step or an inference step. This can reduce the operational overhead of managing the feature processing workflow and ensure its consistency and reproducibility2.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option B: Using an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance to experiment with different feature transformations, saving the transformations to Amazon S3, using Amazon QuickSight for visualization, and packaging the feature processing steps into an AWS Lambda function for automation will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to write the code for the feature transformations, the data storage, the data visualization, and the Lambda function. Moreover, AWS Lambda has limitations on the execution time, memory size, and package size, which may not be sufficient for complex feature processing tasks3.

Option C: Using AWS Glue Studio with custom code to experiment with different feature transformations, saving the transformations to Amazon S3, using Amazon QuickSight for visualization, and packaging the feature processing steps into an AWS Lambda function for automation will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. AWS Glue Studio is a visual interface that allows data engineers to create and run extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs on AWS Glue. However, AWS Glue Studio does not provide preconfigured transformations or templates for feature engineering or data visualization. The data scientist will have to write custom code for these tasks, as well as for the Lambda function. Moreover, AWS Glue Studio is not integrated with SageMaker pipelines, and it may not be optimized for machine learning workflows4.

Option D: Using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler preconfigured transformations to experiment with different feature transformations, saving the transformations to Amazon S3, using Amazon QuickSight for visualization, packaging each feature transformation step into a separate AWS Lambda function, and using AWS Step Functions for workflow automation will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to create and manage multiple AWS Lambda functions and AWS Step Functions, which can increase the complexity and cost of the solution. Moreover, AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions may not be compatible with SageMaker pipelines, and they may not be optimized for machine learning workflows5.

1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler

2: Amazon SageMaker Pipelines

3: AWS Lambda

4: AWS Glue Studio

5: AWS Step Functions

A VPC endpoint is a logical device that enables private connections between a VPC and supported AWS services. A VPC endpoint can be either a gateway endpoint or an interface endpoint. A gateway endpoint is a gateway that is a target for a specified route in the route table, used for traffic destined to a supported AWS service. An interface endpoint is an elastic network interface with a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to a supported service1

In this case, the Machine Learning Specialist can create a gateway endpoint for Amazon S3, which is a supported service for gateway endpoints. A gateway endpoint for Amazon S3 enables the VPC to access Amazon S3 privately, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. The traffic between the VPC and Amazon S3 does not leave the Amazon network2

To restrict access to the dataset stored in Amazon S3, the Machine Learning Specialist can apply a bucket access policy that allows access only from the given VPC endpoint and the VPC. A bucket access policy is a resource-based policy that defines who can access a bucket and what actions they can perform. A bucket access policy can use various conditions to control access, such as the source IP address, the source VPC, the source VPC endpoint, etc. In this case, the Machine Learning Specialist can use the aws:sourceVpce condition to specify the ID of the VPC endpoint, and the aws:sourceVpc condition to specify the ID of the VPC. This way, only the requests that originate from the VPC endpoint or the VPC can access the bucket that contains the dataset34

The other options are not valid or secure ways to satisfy the requirements. Creating a VPC endpoint and applying a bucket access policy that allows access from the given VPC endpoint and an Amazon EC2 instance is not a good option, as it does not restrict access to the VPC. An Amazon EC2 instance is a virtual server that runs in the AWS cloud. An Amazon EC2 instance can have a public IP address or a private IP address, depending on the network configuration. Allowing access from an Amazon EC2 instance does not guarantee that the instance is in the same VPC as the VPC endpoint, and may expose the dataset to unauthorized access. Creating a VPC endpoint and using Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) to allow traffic between only the given VPC endpoint and an Amazon EC2 instance is not a good option, as it does not restrict access to the VPC. NACLs are stateless firewalls that can control inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level. NACLs can use rules to allow or deny traffic based on the protocol, port, and source or destination IP address. However, NACLs do not support VPC endpoints as a source or destination, and cannot filter traffic based on the VPC endpoint ID or the VPC ID. Therefore, using NACLs does not guarantee that the traffic is from the VPC endpoint or the VPC, and may expose the dataset to unauthorized access. Creating a VPC endpoint and using security groups to restrict access to the given VPC endpoint and an Amazon EC2 instance is not a good option, as it does not restrict access to the VPC. Security groups are stateful firewalls that can control inbound and outbound traffic at the instance level. Security groups can use rules to allow or deny traffic based on the protocol, port, and source or destination. However, security groups do not support VPC endpoints as a source or destination, and cannot filter traffic based on the VPC endpoint ID or the VPC ID. Therefore, using security groups does not guarantee that the traffic is from the VPC endpoint or the VPC, and may expose the dataset to unauthorized access.

 Quantile binning is a data transformation technique that can be used to handle skewed and non-linear numerical features. It divides the range of a feature into equal-sized bins based on the percentiles of the data. Each bin is assigned a numerical value that represents the midpoint of the bin. This way, the feature values are transformed into a more uniform distribution that can improve the performance of linear models. Quantile binning can also reduce the impact of outliers and noise in the data.

One-hot encoding, Cartesian product transformation, and normalization are not suitable for this scenario. One-hot encoding is used to transform categorical features into binary features. Cartesian product transformation is used to create new features by combining existing features. Normalization is used to scale numerical features to a standard range, but it does not change the shape of the distribution. References:

Data Transformations for Machine Learning

Quantile Binning Transformation

SageMaker’s TrainingJobEarlyStoppingType set to AUTO stops training jobs early when they no longer improve the objective metric, significantly reducing tuning job durations.

From AWS documentation:

“You can use early stopping to terminate training jobs that are unlikely to result in a better objective metric than previously completed jobs. This can reduce tuning costs and duration.”

— AWS SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning documentation

The best solution to meet the requirements of the company is to use AWS DataSync to make an initial copy of the entire dataset, and schedule subsequent incremental transfers of changing data until the final cutover from on premises to AWS. This is because:

AWS DataSync is an online data movement and discovery service that simplifies data migration and helps you quickly, easily, and securely transfer your file or object data to, from, and between AWS storage services 1. AWS DataSync can copy data between on-premises object storage and Amazon S3, and also supports encryption, scheduling, monitoring, and data integrity validation 1.

AWS DataSync can make an initial copy of the entire dataset by using a DataSync agent, which is a software appliance that connects to your on-premises storage and manages the data transfer to AWS 2. The DataSync agent can be deployed as a virtual machine (VM) on your existing hypervisor, or as an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account 2.

AWS DataSync can schedule subsequent incremental transfers of changing data by using a task, which is a configuration that specifies the source and destination locations, the options for the transfer, and the schedule for the transfer 3. You can create a task to run once or on a recurring schedule, and you can also use filters to include or exclude specific files or objects based on their names or prefixes 3.

AWS DataSync can perform the final cutover from on premises to AWS by using a sync task, which is a type of task that synchronizes the data in the source and destination locations 4. A sync task transfers only the data that has changed or that doesn’t exist in the destination, and also deletes any files or objects from the destination that were deleted from the source since the last sync 4.

Therefore, by using AWS DataSync, the company can create a data repository in the AWS Cloud for machine learning projects, and use Amazon S3 for the data storage, while meeting the requirements of encryption, scheduling, monitoring, and data integrity validation.

Data Transfer Service - AWS DataSync

Deploying a DataSync Agent

Creating a Task

Syncing Data with AWS DataSync

Feature selection is the process of selecting a subset of extracted features that are relevant and contribute to minimizing the error rate of a trained model. Some techniques for feature selection are:

Correlation plot with heat maps: This technique visualizes the correlation between features using a color-coded matrix. Features that are highly correlated with each other or with the target variable can be identified and removed to reduce redundancy and noise.

Univariate selection: This technique evaluates each feature individually based on a statistical test, such as chi-square, ANOVA, or mutual information, and selects the features that have the highest scores or p-values. This technique is simple and fast, but it does not consider the interactions between features.

Feature importance with a tree-based classifier: This technique uses a tree-based classifier, such as random forest or gradient boosting, to rank the features based on their importance in splitting the nodes. Features that have low importance scores can be dropped from the model. This technique can capture the non-linear relationships and interactions between features.

The other options are not techniques for feature selection, but rather for feature engineering, which is the process of creating, transforming, or extracting features from the original data. Feature engineering can improve the performance and interpretability of the model, but it does not reduce the number of features.

Data scaling with standardization and normalization: This technique transforms the features to have a common scale, such as zero mean and unit variance, or a range between 0 and 1. This technique can help some algorithms, such as k-means or logistic regression, to converge faster and avoid numerical instability, but it does not change the number of features.

Data binning: This technique groups the continuous features into discrete bins or categories based on some criteria, such as equal width, equal frequency, or clustering. This technique can reduce the noise and outliers in the data, and also create ordinal or nominal features that can be used for some algorithms, such as decision trees or naive Bayes, but it does not reduce the number of features.

Data augmentation: This technique generates new data from the existing data by applying some transformations, such as rotation, flipping, cropping, or noise addition. This technique can increase the size and diversity of the data, and help prevent overfitting, but it does not reduce the number of features.

Feature engineering - Machine Learning Lens

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot now provides feature selection and the ability to change data types while creating an AutoML experiment

Feature Selection in Machine Learning | Baeldung on Computer Science

Feature Selection in Machine Learning: An easy Introduction

The best way to retrain the model to meet the requirements is to set the target_recall hyperparameter to 90% and set the binary_classifier_model_selection_criteria hyperparameter to recall_at_target_precision. This will instruct the linear learner algorithm to optimize the model for a high recall score, while maintaining a reasonable precision score. Recall is the proportion of actual positives that were identified correctly, which is important for the company’s goal of reaching at least 90% of the customers who are likely to buy the new product1. Precision is the proportion of positive identifications that were actually correct, which is also relevant for the company’s budget and efficiency2. By setting the target_recall to 90%, the algorithm will try to achieve a recall score of at least 90%, and by setting the binary_classifier_model_selection_criteria to recall_at_target_precision, the algorithm will select the model that has the highest recall score among those that have a precision score equal to or higher than the target precision3. The target precision is automatically set to the median of the precision scores of all the models trained in parallel4.

The other options are not correct or optimal, because they have the following drawbacks:

B: Setting the target_precision hyperparameter to 90% and setting the binary_classifier_model_selection_criteria hyperparameter to precision_at_target_recall will optimize the model for a high precision score, while maintaining a reasonable recall score. However, this is not aligned with the company’s goal of reaching at least 90% of the customers who are likely to buy the new product, as precision does not reflect how well the model identifies the actual positives1. Moreover, setting the target_precision to 90% might be too high and unrealistic for the dataset, as the current precision score is only 75%4.

C: Using 90% of the historical data for training and setting the number of epochs to 20 will not necessarily improve the recall score of the model, as it does not change the optimization objective or the model selection criteria. Moreover, using more data for training might reduce the amount of data available for validation, which is needed for selecting the best model among the ones trained in parallel3. The number of epochs is also not a decisive factor for the recall score, as it depends on the learning rate, the optimizer, and the convergence of the algorithm5.

D: Setting the normalize_label hyperparameter to true and setting the number of classes to 2 will not affect the recall score of the model, as these are irrelevant hyperparameters for binary classification problems. The normalize_label hyperparameter is only applicable for regression problems, as it controls whether the label is normalized to have zero mean and unit variance3. The number of classes hyperparameter is only applicable for multiclass classification problems, as it specifies the number of output classes3.

1: Classification: Precision and Recall | Machine Learning | Google for Developers

2: Precision and recall - Wikipedia

3: Linear Learner Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

4: How linear learner works - Amazon SageMaker

5: Getting hands-on with Amazon SageMaker Linear Learner - Pluralsight

K-means clustering is a machine learning technique that can be used to classify unlabeled data into different groups based on their similarity. It is an unsupervised learning method, which means it does not require any prior knowledge or labels for the data. K-means clustering works by randomly assigning data points to a number of clusters, then iteratively updating the cluster centers and reassigning the data points until the clusters are stable. The result is a partition of the data into distinct and homogeneous groups. K-means clustering can be useful for exploratory data analysis, data compression, anomaly detection, and feature extraction. References:

K-Means Clustering: A tutorial on how to use K-means clustering with Amazon SageMaker.

Unsupervised Learning: A video that explains the concept and applications of unsupervised learning.

The best solution is to configure Amazon EventBridge to run a predefined SageMaker pipeline to perform the transformations when a new data is detected in the S3 bucket. This solution requires the least development effort because it leverages the native integration between EventBridge and SageMaker Pipelines, which allows you to trigger a pipeline execution based on an event rule. EventBridge can monitor the S3 bucket for new data uploads and invoke the pipeline that contains the same transformations and feature engineering steps that were defined in SageMaker Data Wrangler. The pipeline can then ingest the transformed data into the online feature store for training and inference.

The other solutions are less optimal because they require more development effort and additional services. Using AWS Lambda or AWS Step Functions would require writing custom code to invoke the SageMaker pipeline and handle any errors or retries. Using Apache Airflow would require setting up and maintaining an Airflow server and DAGs, as well as integrating with the SageMaker API.

Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines integration

Create a pipeline using a JSON specification

Ingest data into a feature group

The solution that will meet the requirements with the least development effort is to use Amazon SageMaker Feature Store to set feature groups for the current features that the ML models use, assign the required metadata for each feature, and use Amazon QuickSight to analyze the metadata. This solution can leverage the existing AWS services and features to perform feature-level metadata analysis and reporting.

Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a fully managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, search, and share machine learning (ML) features. The service provides feature management capabilities such as enabling easy feature reuse, low latency serving, time travel, and ensuring consistency between features used in training and inference workflows. A feature group is a logical grouping of ML features whose organization and structure is defined by a feature group schema. A feature group schema consists of a list of feature definitions, each of which specifies the name, type, and metadata of a feature. The metadata can include information such as data sensitivity, authorship, description, and parameters. The metadata can help make features discoverable, understandable, and traceable. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store allows users to set feature groups for the current features that the ML models use, and assign the required metadata for each feature using the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3), AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or Amazon SageMaker Studio1.

Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed, serverless business intelligence service that makes it easy to create and publish interactive dashboards that include ML insights. Amazon QuickSight can connect to various data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and analyze the data using standard SQL or built-in ML-powered analytics. Amazon QuickSight can also create rich visualizations and reports that can be accessed from any device, and securely shared with anyone inside or outside an organization. Amazon QuickSight can be used to analyze the metadata of the features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and generate a report that summarizes the metadata analysis2.

The other options are either more complex or less effective than the proposed solution. Using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler to select the features and create a data flow to perform feature-level metadata analysis would require additional steps and resources, and may not capture all the metadata attributes that the company requires. Creating an Amazon DynamoDB table to store feature-level metadata would introduce redundancy and inconsistency, as the metadata is already stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store. Using SageMaker Studio to analyze the metadata would not generate a report that can be easily shared and accessed by the company.

1: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store – Amazon Web Services

2: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence Service - Amazon Web Services

The solution that will accomplish the necessary transformation to train the Amazon SageMaker model with the least amount of administrative overhead is to crawl the data using AWS Glue crawlers, write an AWS Glue ETL job that merges the two tables and writes the output in CSV format to Amazon S3. This solution leverages the serverless capabilities of AWS Glue to automatically discover the schema of the data sources, and to perform the data integration and transformation without requiring any cluster management or configuration. The output in CSV format is compatible with Amazon SageMaker and can be easily loaded into a training job. References: AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker

The most effective way to encode this categorical feature into a numeric feature is to use Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler similarity encoding on the column to create embeddings of vectors of real numbers. Similarity encoding is a technique that transforms categorical features into numerical features by computing the similarity between the categories. Similarity encoding can handle high cardinality and redundancy in categorical features, as it can group similar categories together based on their string similarity. For example, if the column contains the values “aspirin”, “asprin”, and “ibuprofen”, similarity encoding will assign a high similarity score to “aspirin” and “asprin”, and a low similarity score to “ibuprofen”. Similarity encoding can also create embeddings of vectors of real numbers, which can be used as input for machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to prepare data for machine learning quickly and easily. You can use SageMaker Data Wrangler to apply similarity encoding to a column of categorical data, and generate embeddings of vectors of real numbers that capture the similarity between the categories1. The other options are either less effective or more complex to implement. Spell checking the column and using one-hot encoding would require additional steps and resources, and may not capture all the misspellings or redundancies. One-hot encoding would also create a large number of features, which could increase the dimensionality and sparsity of the data. Ordinal encoding would assign an arbitrary order to the categories, which could introduce bias or noise in the data. References:

1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – Amazon Web Services

To evaluate the contribution of each feature before model training, feature importance scores are a primary tool. In Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, a Quick Model can be used to rapidly generate a model on the dataset and return feature importance scores. These scores indicate how much each feature influences the target variable.

“Use Quick Model to generate feature importance scores quickly to help understand which features contribute the most to predictions. These scores range from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating higher contribution.”

This allows ML engineers to assess feature relevance without full-scale model development, thus saving time and effort in the feature selection phase of the pipeline.

The machine learning model in this scenario shows signs of overfitting, as evidenced by better performance on the training dataset than on the testing dataset. Overfitting indicates that the model is capturing noise or details specific to the training data rather than general patterns.

One common approach to reduce overfitting is L2 regularization, which adds a penalty to the loss function for large weights and helps the model generalize better by smoothing out the weight distribution. By increasing the value of the L2 hyperparameter, the ML specialist can increase this penalty, helping to mitigate overfitting and improve performance on the testing dataset.

Options like increasing momentum or reducing dropout are less effective for addressing overfitting in this context.

The best storage scheme for this scenario is to store datasets as files in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a scalable, cost-effective, and durable object storage service that can store any amount and type of data. Amazon S3 also supports querying data using SQL with Amazon Athena, a serverless interactive query service that can analyze data directly in S3. This way, the Data Science team can easily explore and analyze their datasets without having to load them into a database or a compute instance.

The other options are not as suitable for this scenario because:

Storing datasets as files in an Amazon EBS volume attached to an Amazon EC2 instance would limit the scalability and availability of the data, as EBS volumes are only accessible within a single availability zone and have a maximum size of 16 TiB. Also, EBS volumes are more expensive than S3 buckets and require provisioning and managing EC2 instances.

Storing datasets as tables in a multi-node Amazon Redshift cluster would incur higher costs and complexity than using S3 and Athena. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse service that is optimized for analytical queries over structured or semi-structured data. However, it requires setting up and maintaining a cluster of nodes, loading data into tables, and choosing the right distribution and sort keys for optimal performance. Moreover, Amazon Redshift charges for both storage and compute, while S3 and Athena only charge for the amount of data stored and scanned, respectively.

Storing datasets as global tables in Amazon DynamoDB would not be feasible for large amounts of data, as DynamoDB is a key-value and document database service that is designed for fast and consistent performance at any scale. However, DynamoDB has a limit of 400 KB per item and 25 GB per partition key value, which may not be enough for storing large datasets. Also, DynamoDB does not support SQL queries natively, and would require using a service like Amazon EMR or AWS Glue to run SQL queries over DynamoDB data.

Amazon S3 - Cloud Object Storage

Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3

Amazon EBS - Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Redshift – Data Warehouse Solution - AWS

Amazon DynamoDB – NoSQL Cloud Database Service

Stratified sampling is a technique that preserves the class distribution of the original dataset when creating a smaller or split dataset. This means that the proportion of examples from each class in the original dataset is maintained in the smaller or split dataset. Stratified sampling can help improve the validation accuracy of the model by ensuring that the validation dataset is representative of the original dataset and not biased towards any class. This can reduce the variance and overfitting of the model and increase its generalization ability. Stratified sampling can be applied to both oversampling and undersampling methods, depending on whether the goal is to increase or decrease the size of the dataset.

The other options are not effective ways to improve the validation accuracy of the model. Acquiring additional data about the majority classes in the original dataset will only increase the imbalance and make the model more biased towards the majority classes. Using a smaller, randomly sampled version of the training dataset will not guarantee that the class distribution is preserved and may result in losing important information from the minority classes. Performing systematic sampling on the original dataset will also not ensure that the class distribution is preserved and may introduce sampling bias if the original dataset is ordered or grouped by class.

The solution C meets the requirements because it minimizes costs for compute infrastructure, maximizes the scalability of resources for training, and facilitates the use of an ML model in low-connectivity environments. The solution C involves the following steps:

Move the training data to an Amazon S3 bucket. This will enable the company to store the large amount of data in a durable, scalable, and cost-effective way. It will also allow the company to access the data from the cloud for training and evaluation purposes1.

Train and evaluate the model by using Amazon SageMaker. This will enable the company to use a fully managed service that provides various features and tools for building, training, tuning, and deploying ML models. Amazon SageMaker can handle large-scale data processing and distributed training, and it can leverage the power of AWS compute resources such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate2.

Optimize the model by using SageMaker Neo. This will enable the company to reduce the size of the model and improve its performance and efficiency. SageMaker Neo can compile the model into an executable that can run on various hardware platforms, such as CPUs, GPUs, and edge devices3.

Set up an edge device in the manufacturing facilities with AWS IoT Greengrass. This will enable the company to deploy the model on a local device that can run inference in real time, even in low-connectivity environments. AWS IoT Greengrass can extend AWS cloud capabilities to the edge, and it can securely communicate with the cloud for updates and synchronization4.

Deploy the model on the edge device. This will enable the company to automate quality control in its facilities by using the model to detect defects in new parts as they move on a conveyor belt. The model can run inference locally on the edge device without requiring internet connectivity, and it can send the results to the cloud when the connection is available4.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Deploying the model on a SageMaker hosting services endpoint will not facilitate the use of the model in low-connectivity environments, as it will require internet access to perform inference. Moreover, it may incur higher costs for hosting and data transfer than deploying the model on an edge device.

Option B: Training and evaluating the model on premises will not minimize costs for compute infrastructure, as it will require the company to maintain and upgrade its own hardware and software. Moreover, it will not maximize the scalability of resources for training, as it will limit the company’s ability to leverage the cloud’s elasticity and flexibility.

Option D: Training the model on premises will not minimize costs for compute infrastructure, nor maximize the scalability of resources for training, for the same reasons as option B.

1: Amazon S3

2: Amazon SageMaker

3: SageMaker Neo

4: AWS IoT Greengrass

The FindMatches transform is a machine learning transform that can identify and match similar records from different datasets, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier or exact field values. The FindMatches transform can also remove duplicate records from a single dataset. The FindMatches transform can be used with AWS Glue crawlers and jobs to process the data from various sources and store it in a data lake. The FindMatches transform can be created and managed using the AWS Glue console, API, or AWS Glue Studio.

The other options are not suitable for this use case because:

Option A: Using an AWS Lambda function to process the data and compare equal strings in the fields from the two datasets is not an efficient or scalable solution. It would require writing custom code and handling the data loading and cleansing logic. It would also not account for variations or inconsistencies in the field values, such as spelling errors, abbreviations, or missing data.

Option B: The AWS Glue SearchTables API operation is used to search for tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog based on a set of criteria. It is not a machine learning transform that can match records across different datasets or remove duplicates. It would also require writing custom code to invoke the API and process the results.

Option D: AWS Lake Formation does not provide a custom transform feature. It provides predefined blueprints for common data ingestion scenarios, such as database snapshot, incremental database, and log file. These blueprints do not support matching records across different datasets or removing duplicates.

The approach that will meet the requirements with the least operational overhead is to deploy all the models to a single SageMaker endpoint, treat each model as a production variant, configure an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created, and configure the Lambda function to call each production variant and return the results of each model. This approach involves the following steps:

Deploy all the models to a single SageMaker endpoint. Amazon SageMaker is a service that can build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker can deploy multiple models to a single endpoint, which is a web service that can serve predictions from the models. Each model can be treated as a production variant, which is a version of the model that runs on one or more instances. Amazon SageMaker can distribute the traffic among the production variants according to the specified weights1.

Treat each model as a production variant. Amazon SageMaker can deploy multiple models to a single endpoint, which is a web service that can serve predictions from the models. Each model can be treated as a production variant, which is a version of the model that runs on one or more instances. Amazon SageMaker can distribute the traffic among the production variants according to the specified weights1.

Configure an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created. Amazon S3 is a service that can store and retrieve any amount of data. Amazon S3 can send event notifications when certain actions occur on the objects in a bucket, such as object creation, deletion, or modification. Amazon S3 can invoke an AWS Lambda function as a destination for the event notifications. AWS Lambda is a service that can run code without provisioning or managing servers2.

Configure the Lambda function to call each production variant and return the results of each model. AWS Lambda can execute the code that can call the SageMaker endpoint and specify the production variant to invoke. AWS Lambda can use the AWS SDK or the SageMaker Runtime API to send requests to the endpoint and receive the predictions from the models. AWS Lambda can return the results of each model as a response to the event notification3.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Configuring an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created, configuring the Lambda function to create three SageMaker batch transform jobs, one batch transform job for each model for each document, will incur more operational overhead than using a single SageMaker endpoint. Amazon SageMaker batch transform is a service that can process large datasets in batches and store the predictions in Amazon S3. Amazon SageMaker batch transform is not suitable for real-time inference, as it introduces a delay between the request and the response. Moreover, creating three batch transform jobs for each document will increase the complexity and cost of the solution4.

Option C: Deploying each model to its own SageMaker endpoint, configuring an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created, configuring the Lambda function to call each endpoint and return the results of each model, will incur more operational overhead than using a single SageMaker endpoint. Deploying each model to its own endpoint will increase the number of resources and endpoints to manage and monitor. Moreover, calling each endpoint separately will increase the latency and network traffic of the solution5.

Option D: Deploying each model to its own SageMaker endpoint, creating three AWS Lambda functions, configuring each Lambda function to call a different endpoint and return the results, configuring three S3 event notifications to invoke the Lambda functions when new documents are created, will incur more operational overhead than using a single SageMaker endpoint and a single Lambda function. Deploying each model to its own endpoint will increase the number of resources and endpoints to manage and monitor. Creating three Lambda functions will increase the complexity and cost of the solution. Configuring three S3 event notifications will increase the number of triggers and destinations to manage and monitor6.

1: Deploying Multiple Models to a Single Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker

2: Configuring Amazon S3 Event Notifications - Amazon Simple Storage Service

3: Invoke an Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker

4: Get Inferences for an Entire Dataset with Batch Transform - Amazon SageMaker

5: Deploy a Model - Amazon SageMaker

6: AWS Lambda

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the most operationally simple and fully managed service for real-time data ingestion and transformation. Firehose supports:

Direct ingestion from edge locations or public endpoints

Integration with AWS Lambda for transformation

Backup of raw source records

Error handling with separate S3 prefixes for failed transformations

“You can configure your delivery stream to use a Lambda function to transform incoming records, and to back up all or failed records to Amazon S3.”

This meets all requirements with minimal infrastructure management:

Real-time ingestion

Inline transformation

Raw data and failed transformation storage in S3

The combination of steps that the ML engineer should take to train the model are to create a .lst file that contains a list of image files and corresponding class labels, upload the .lst file to Amazon S3, and initiate transfer learning by training the model using the images of less common species. This approach will allow the ML engineer to leverage the existing ImageNetV2 CNN model and fine-tune it with the new data using Pipe mode in SageMaker.

A .lst file is a text file that contains a list of image files and corresponding class labels, separated by tabs. The .lst file format is required for using the SageMaker image classification algorithm with Pipe mode. Pipe mode is a feature of SageMaker that enables streaming data directly from Amazon S3 to the training instances, without downloading the data first. Pipe mode can reduce the startup time, improve the I/O throughput, and enable training on large datasets that exceed the disk size limit. To use Pipe mode, the ML engineer needs to upload the .lst file to Amazon S3 and specify the S3 path as the input data channel for the training job1.

Transfer learning is a technique that enables reusing a pre-trained model for a new task by fine-tuning the model parameters with new data. Transfer learning can save time and computational resources, as well as improve the performance of the model, especially when the new task is similar to the original task. The SageMaker image classification algorithm supports transfer learning by allowing the ML engineer to specify the number of output classes and the number of layers to be retrained. The ML engineer can use the existing ImageNetV2 CNN model, which is trained on 1,000 classes of common objects, and fine-tune it with the new data of less common animal species, which is a similar task2.

The other options are either less effective or not supported by the SageMaker image classification algorithm. Using a ResNet model and initiating full training mode would require training the model from scratch, which would take more time and resources than transfer learning. Using an Inception model is not possible, as the SageMaker image classification algorithm only supports ResNet and ImageNetV2 models. Using an augmented manifest file in JSON Lines format is not compatible with Pipe mode, as Pipe mode only supports .lst files for image classification1.

1: Using Pipe input mode for Amazon SageMaker algorithms | AWS Machine Learning Blog

2: Image Classification Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

A confusion matrix is a matrix that summarizes the performance of a machine learning model on a set of test data. It displays the number of true positives (TP), true negatives (TN), false positives (FP), and false negatives (FN) produced by the model on the test data1. For multi-class classification, the matrix shape will be equal to the number of classes i.e for n classes it will be nXn1. The diagonal values represent the number of correct predictions for each class, and the off-diagonal values represent the number of incorrect predictions for each class1.

The BlazingText algorithm is a proprietary machine learning algorithm for forecasting time series using causal convolutional neural networks (CNNs). BlazingText works best with large datasets containing hundreds of time series. It accepts item metadata, and is the only Forecast algorithm that accepts related time series data without future values2.

From the confusion matrices for the training and test sets, we can observe the following:

The model has a high accuracy on the training set, as most of the diagonal values are high and the off-diagonal values are low. This means that the model is able to learn the patterns and features of the training data well.

However, the model has a lower accuracy on the test set, as some of the diagonal values are lower and some of the off-diagonal values are higher. This means that the model is not able to generalize well to the unseen data and makes more errors.

The model has a particularly high error rate for classes B and E on the test set, as the values of M_22 and M_55 are much lower than the values of M_12, M_21, M_15, M_25, M_51, and M_52. This means that the model is confusing classes B and E with other classes more often than it should.

The model has a relatively low error rate for classes A, C, and D on the test set, as the values of M_11, M_33, and M_44 are high and the values of M_13, M_14, M_23, M_24, M_31, M_32, M_34, M_41, M_42, and M_43 are low. This means that the model is able to distinguish classes A, C, and D from other classes well.

These results indicate that the model is overfitting for classes B and E, meaning that it is memorizing the specific features of these classes in the training data, but failing to capture the general features that are applicable to the test data. Overfitting is a common problem in machine learning, where the model performs well on the training data, but poorly on the test data3. Some possible causes of overfitting are:

The model is too complex or has too many parameters for the given data. This makes the model flexible enough to fit the noise and outliers in the training data, but reduces its ability to generalize to new data.

The data is too small or not representative of the population. This makes the model learn from a limited or biased sample of data, but fails to capture the variability and diversity of the population.

The data is imbalanced or skewed. This makes the model learn from a disproportionate or uneven distribution of data, but fails to account for the minority or rare classes.

Some possible solutions to prevent or reduce overfitting are:

Simplify the model or use regularization techniques. This reduces the complexity or the number of parameters of the model, and prevents it from fitting the noise and outliers in the data. Regularization techniques, such as L1 or L2 regularization, add a penalty term to the loss function of the model, which shrinks the weights of the model and reduces overfitting3.

Increase the size or diversity of the data. This provides more information and examples for the model to learn from, and increases its ability to generalize to new data. Data augmentation techniques, such as rotation, flipping, cropping, or noise addition, can generate new data from the existing data by applying some transformations3.

Balance or resample the data. This adjusts the distribution or the frequency of the data, and ensures that the model learns from all classes equally. Resampling techniques, such as oversampling or undersampling, can create a balanced dataset by increasing or decreasing the number of samples for each class3.

Confusion Matrix in Machine Learning - GeeksforGeeks

BlazingText algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Overfitting and Underfitting in Machine Learning - GeeksforGeeks

The best option is to use Amazon SageMaker Studio to rebuild the model and deploy it at an endpoint. Then, use Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to store inferences and use the inferences to create Shapley values that help explain model behavior. Shapley values are a way of attributing the contribution of each feature to the model output. They can help the credit team understand why the model makes certain decisions and how the features affect the model outcomes. A chart that shows features and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values can be created using the SHAP library in Python. This option is the most operationally efficient because it leverages the existing XGBoost training container and the built-in capabilities of Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and SHAP library. References:

Amazon SageMaker Studio

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

SHAP library