Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Practice Test

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

The solution A will meet the requirements with the least development effort because it uses Amazon Kendra, which is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Amazon Kendra can index company documents from various sources and formats, such as PDF, HTML, Word, and more. Amazon Kendra can also integrate with chatbots by using the Amazon Kendra Query API operation, which can understand natural language questions and provide relevant answers from the indexed documents. Amazon Kendra can also provide additional information, such as document excerpts, links, and FAQs, to enhance the chatbot experience1.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option B: Training a Bidirectional Attention Flow (BiDAF) network based on past customer questions and company documents, deploying the model as a real-time Amazon SageMaker endpoint, and integrating the model with the chatbot by using the SageMaker Runtime InvokeEndpoint API operation will incur more development effort than using Amazon Kendra. The company will have to write the code for the BiDAF network, which is a complex deep learning model for question answering. The company will also have to manage the SageMaker endpoint, the model artifact, and the inference logic2.

Option C: Training an Amazon SageMaker BlazingText model based on past customer questions and company documents, deploying the model as a real-time SageMaker endpoint, and integrating the model with the chatbot by using the SageMaker Runtime InvokeEndpoint API operation will incur more development effort than using Amazon Kendra. The company will have to write the code for the BlazingText model, which is a fast and scalable text classification and word embedding algorithm. The company will also have to manage the SageMaker endpoint, the model artifact, and the inference logic3.

Option D: Indexing company documents by using Amazon OpenSearch Service and integrating the chatbot with OpenSearch Service by using the OpenSearch Service k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) Query API operation will not meet the requirements effectively. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed service that provides fast and scalable search and analytics capabilities. However, it is not designed for natural language question answering, and it may not provide accurate or relevant answers for the chatbot. Moreover, the k-NN Query API operation is used to find the most similar documents or vectors based on a distance function, not to find the best answers based on a natural language query4.

1: Amazon Kendra

2: Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

3: Amazon SageMaker BlazingText

4: Amazon OpenSearch Service

 Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that can analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena can also query data from other sources, such as MySQL and Amazon Redshift, by using federated queries. Federated queries allow Amazon Athena to run SQL queries across data sources, such as relational and non-relational databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. By using Amazon Athena, the Data Scientist can perform an analysis by joining the three datasets from Amazon S3, MySQL, and Amazon Redshift, and then calculating the average of a few selected columns from the joined data. Amazon Athena can also integrate with other AWS services, such as AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight, to provide additional features, such as data cataloging and visualization.

What is Amazon Athena? - Amazon Athena

Federated Query Overview - Amazon Athena

Querying Data from Amazon S3 - Amazon Athena

Querying Data from MySQL - Amazon Athena

[Querying Data from Amazon Redshift - Amazon Athena]

The company needs to transcribe petabytes of audio files from an on-premises VoIP system to an S3 bucket in the AWS Cloud. The transcription algorithm requires GPUs for inference, which are not available on the on-premises system. The VPN connection over a 100 Mbps connection is not sufficient to transfer the large amount of data quickly. Therefore, the company should use an AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized device with an NVIDIA Tesla module to run the transcription algorithm locally and leverage the GPU power. The device can store up to 42 TB of data and can be shipped back to AWS for data ingestion. The company can use AWS DataSync to send the resulting transcriptions to the transcription S3 bucket in the AWS Cloud. This solution minimizes the network bandwidth and latency issues and enables faster data processing and transfer.

Option B is incorrect because AWS Snowcone is a small, portable, rugged, and secure edge computing and data transfer device that can store up to 8 TB of data. It is not suitable for processing petabytes of data and does not support GPU-based instances.

Option C is incorrect because AWS Outposts is a service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. It is not designed for data transfer and ingestion, and it would require additional infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Option D is incorrect because AWS DataSync is a service that makes it easy to move large amounts of data to and from AWS over the internet or AWS Direct Connect. However, using DataSync to ingest the audio files to S3 would still be limited by the network bandwidth and latency. Moreover, running the transcription algorithm on AWS Lambda would incur additional costs and complexity, and it would not leverage the GPU power that the algorithm requires.

AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized

AWS DataSync

AWS Snowcone

AWS Outposts

AWS Lambda

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

When forecasting sales data, missing values can significantly impact model accuracy, especially for time series models. Approximately 10% of the days in this dataset lack sales data, which may cause gaps in patterns and disrupt seasonal trends. Linear interpolation is an effective technique for estimating and filling in missing data points based on adjacent known values, thus preserving the continuity of the time series.

By interpolating the missing values, the ML specialist can provide the model with a more complete and consistent dataset, potentially enhancing performance. This approach maintains the daily data granularity, which is important for accurately capturing trends at that frequency.

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.

The best option is to use the event tracker in Amazon Personalize to include real-time user interactions. This will allow the model to learn from the feedback of the customers during the marketing campaign and adjust the recommendations accordingly. The event tracker can capture click-through, add-to-cart, purchase, and other types of events that indicate the user’s preferences. By using the event tracker, the company can improve the relevance and freshness of the recommendations and avoid the decrease in sales.

The other options are not as effective as using the event tracker. Adding user metadata and using the HRNN-Metadata recipe in Amazon Personalize can help capture the user’s attributes and preferences, but it will not reflect the changes in user behavior during the marketing campaign. Implementing a new solution using the built-in factorization machines (FM) algorithm in Amazon SageMaker can also provide personalized recommendations, but it will require more time and effort to train and deploy the model. Adding event type and event value fields to the interactions dataset in Amazon Personalize can help capture the importance and context of each interaction, but it will not update the model with the latest user feedback.

Recording events - Amazon Personalize

Using real-time events - Amazon Personalize

The solution C will improve the computational efficiency of the models because it uses Amazon SageMaker Debugger and pruning, which are techniques that can reduce the size and complexity of the convolutional neural network (CNN) models. The solution C involves the following steps:

Use Amazon SageMaker Debugger to gain visibility into the training weights, gradients, biases, and activation outputs. Amazon SageMaker Debugger is a service that can capture and analyze the tensors that are emitted during the training process of machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Debugger can provide insights into the model performance, quality, and convergence. Amazon SageMaker Debugger can also help to identify and diagnose issues such as overfitting, underfitting, vanishing gradients, and exploding gradients1.

Compute the filter ranks based on the training information. Filter ranking is a technique that can measure the importance of each filter in a convolutional layer based on some criterion, such as the average percentage of zero activations or the L1-norm of the filter weights. Filter ranking can help to identify the filters that have little or no contribution to the model output, and thus can be removed without affecting the model accuracy2.

Apply pruning to remove the low-ranking filters. Pruning is a technique that can reduce the size and complexity of a neural network by removing the redundant or irrelevant parts of the network, such as neurons, connections, or filters. Pruning can help to improve the computational efficiency, memory usage, and inference speed of the model, as well as to prevent overfitting and improve generalization3.

Set the new weights based on the pruned set of filters. After pruning, the model will have a smaller and simpler architecture, with fewer filters in each convolutional layer. The new weights of the model can be set based on the pruned set of filters, either by initializing them randomly or by fine-tuning them from the original weights4.

Run a new training job with the pruned model. The pruned model can be trained again with the same or a different dataset, using the same or a different framework or algorithm. The new training job can use the same or a different configuration of Amazon SageMaker, such as the instance type, the hyperparameters, or the data ingestion mode. The new training job can also use Amazon SageMaker Debugger to monitor and analyze the training process and the model quality5.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Using Amazon CloudWatch metrics to gain visibility into the SageMaker training weights, gradients, biases, and activation outputs will not be as effective as using Amazon SageMaker Debugger. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that can monitor and observe the operational health and performance of AWS resources and applications. Amazon CloudWatch can provide metrics, alarms, dashboards, and logs for various AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker. However, Amazon CloudWatch does not provide the same level of granularity and detail as Amazon SageMaker Debugger for the tensors that are emitted during the training process of machine learning models. Amazon CloudWatch metrics are mainly focused on the resource utilization and the training progress, not on the model performance, quality, and convergence6.

Option B: Using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to build and run data labeling workflows and collecting a larger labeled dataset with the labeling workflows will not improve the computational efficiency of the models. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is a service that can create high-quality training datasets for machine learning by using human labelers. A larger labeled dataset can help to improve the model accuracy and generalization, but it will not reduce the memory, battery, and hardware consumption of the model. Moreover, a larger labeled dataset may increase the training time and cost of the model7.

Option D: Using Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to gain visibility into the ModelLatency metric and OverheadLatency metric of the model after the company deploys the model and increasing the model learning rate will not improve the computational efficiency of the models. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor is a service that can monitor and analyze the quality and performance of machine learning models that are deployed on Amazon SageMaker endpoints. The ModelLatency metric and the OverheadLatency metric can measure the inference latency of the model and the endpoint, respectively. However, these metrics do not provide any information about the training weights, gradients, biases, and activation outputs of the model, which are needed for pruning. Moreover, increasing the model learning rate will not reduce the size and complexity of the model, but it may affect the model convergence and accuracy.

1: Amazon SageMaker Debugger

2: Pruning Convolutional Neural Networks for Resource Efficient Inference

3: Pruning Neural Networks: A Survey

4: Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks

5: Amazon SageMaker Training Jobs

6: Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon SageMaker

7: Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

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

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 best combination of AWS services to meet the requirements of data discovery, enrichment, transformation, querying, analysis, and reporting with the least coding and infrastructure management is AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight. These services are:

AWS Glue for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that automatically crawls, catalogs, and prepares data from various sources and formats. It also provides a visual interface called AWS Glue DataBrew that allows users to apply over 250 transformations to clean, normalize, and enrich data without writing code1

Amazon Athena for querying and analyzing the results in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that allows users to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It supports a variety of data formats, such as CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet, and Avro. It also integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog to provide a unified view of the data sources and schemas2

Amazon QuickSight for reporting and getting insights. Amazon QuickSight is a serverless business intelligence service that allows users to create and share interactive dashboards and reports. It also provides ML-powered features, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and natural language queries, to help users discover hidden insights from their data3

The other options are not suitable because they either require more coding effort, more infrastructure management, or do not support the desired use cases. For example:

Option A uses Amazon EMR for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation. Amazon EMR is a managed cluster platform that runs Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and other open-source frameworks for big data processing. It requires users to write code in languages such as Python, Scala, or SQL to perform data integration tasks. It also requires users to provision, configure, and scale the clusters according to their needs4

Option B uses Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for data ingestion. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that allows users to process streaming data in real time using SQL or Apache Flink. It is not suitable for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation, which are typically batch-oriented tasks. It also requires users to write code to define the data processing logic and the output destination5

Option D uses AWS Data Pipeline for data transfer and AWS Step Functions for orchestrating AWS Lambda jobs for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation. AWS Data Pipeline is a service that helps users move data between AWS services and on-premises data sources. AWS Step Functions is a service that helps users coordinate multiple AWS services into workflows. AWS Lambda is a service that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. These services require users to write code to define the data sources, destinations, transformations, and workflows. They also require users to manage the scalability, performance, and reliability of the data pipelines.

1: AWS Glue - Data Integration Service - Amazon Web Services

2: Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Query Service - AWS

3: Amazon QuickSight - Business Intelligence Service - AWS

4: Amazon EMR - Amazon Web Services

5: Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics - Amazon Web Services

AWS Data Pipeline - Amazon Web Services

AWS Step Functions - Amazon Web Services

AWS Lambda - Amazon Web Services

Based on the figure provided, the data is not linearly separable. Therefore, a non-linear model such as SVM with a non-linear kernel would be the best choice. SVMs are particularly effective in high-dimensional spaces and are versatile in that they can be used for both linear and non-linear data. Additionally, SVMs have a high level of accuracy and are less prone to overfitting1

 1:

For regression tasks that predict continuous numerical values, such as estimating delivery times, appropriate evaluation metrics quantify the difference between predicted and actual values. Two commonly used metrics are:​

Mean Squared Error (MSE): Calculates the average of the squares of the errors, providing a measure of the quality of an estimator.​

Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE): The square root of MSE, offering an error metric in the same units as the target variable, which aids in interpretability.​

These metrics are standard for assessing the performance of regression models, especially when the goal is to predict continuous outcomes accurately.

The solution D is the best data visualization approach to determine the optimal value of k for the k-means clustering algorithm. The solution D involves the following steps:

Run the k-means clustering algorithm for a range of k. For each value of k, calculate the sum of squared errors (SSE). The SSE is a measure of how well the clusters fit the data. It is calculated by summing the squared distances of each data point to its closest cluster center. A lower SSE indicates a better fit, but it will always decrease as the number of clusters increases. Therefore, the goal is to find the smallest value of k that still has a low SSE1.

Plot a line chart of the SSE for each value of k. The line chart will show how the SSE changes as the value of k increases. Typically, the line chart will have a shape of an elbow, where the SSE drops rapidly at first and then levels off. The optimal value of k is the point after which the curve starts decreasing in a linear fashion. This point is also known as the elbow point, and it represents the balance between the number of clusters and the SSE1.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Calculating the principal component analysis (PCA) components, running the k-means clustering algorithm for a range of k by using only the first two PCA components, and creating a scatter plot with a different color for each cluster will not accurately determine the optimal value of k. PCA is a technique that reduces the dimensionality of the data by transforming it into a new set of features that capture the most variance in the data. However, PCA may not preserve the original structure and distances of the data, and it may lose some information in the process. Therefore, running the k-means clustering algorithm on the PCA components may not reflect the true clusters in the data. Moreover, using only the first two PCA components may not capture enough variance to represent the data well. Furthermore, creating a scatter plot may not be reliable, as it depends on the subjective judgment of the data scientist to decide when the clusters look reasonably separated2.

Option B: Calculating the PCA components and creating a line plot of the number of components against the explained variance will not determine the optimal value of k. This approach is used to determine the optimal number of PCA components to use for dimensionality reduction, not for clustering. The explained variance is the ratio of the variance of each PCA component to the total variance of the data. The optimal number of PCA components is the point where adding more components does not significantly increase the explained variance. However, this number may not correspond to the optimal number of clusters, as PCA and k-means clustering have different objectives and assumptions2.

Option C: Creating a t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) plot for a range of perplexity values will not determine the optimal value of k. t-SNE is a technique that reduces the dimensionality of the data by embedding it into a lower-dimensional space, such as a two-dimensional plane. t-SNE preserves the local structure and distances of the data, and it can reveal clusters and patterns in the data. However, t-SNE does not assign labels or centroids to the clusters, and it does not provide a measure of how well the clusters fit the data. Therefore, t-SNE cannot determine the optimal number of clusters, as it only visualizes the data. Moreover, t-SNE depends on the perplexity parameter, which is a measure of how many neighbors each point considers. The perplexity parameter can affect the shape and size of the clusters, and there is no optimal value for it. Therefore, creating a t-SNE plot for a range of perplexity values may not be consistent or reliable3.

1: How to Determine the Optimal K for K-Means?

2: Principal Component Analysis

3: t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

The best visualization for this task is to create a bar plot, faceted by year, of average sales for each region and add a horizontal line in each facet to represent average sales. This way, the data scientist can easily compare the yearly average sales for each region with the overall average sales and see the trends over time. The bar plot also allows the data scientist to see the relative performance of each region within each year and across years. The other options are less effective because they either do not show the yearly trends, do not show the overall average sales, or do not group the data by region.

pandas.DataFrame.groupby — pandas 2.1.4 documentation

pandas.DataFrame.plot.bar — pandas 2.1.4 documentation

Matplotlib - Bar Plot - Online Tutorials Library

The problem involves assigning multiple related, non-mutually exclusive categories (like "yogurt", "snack", and "dairy product") to customer comments referencing specific products. Amazon Comprehend provides custom classification capabilities, and in this case, the appropriate mode is multi-label, not multi-class.

“Use multi-label mode when each document can belong to more than one class. This is appropriate for situations where the categories are not mutually exclusive.”

This allows a single document to be tagged with several relevant labels simultaneously, which is precisely the use case described.

To retrieve only the latest version of a record in real-time for a single entity (like a customer), the correct method is to use the GetRecord API provided by SageMaker Feature Store.

“Use the GetRecord API to retrieve the latest feature values for a specific record identifier from the online store. This operation returns the latest version of the record only.”

This is optimal for low-latency, single-record lookups, such as real-time inference scenarios. BatchGetRecord is used for multiple records, and Athena queries are for offline/batch analysis and not suited for real-time access.

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

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

The SageMaker Variant Invocations Per Instance setting is the target value for the average number of invocations per instance per minute for the model variant. It is used by the automatic scaling policy to add or remove instances to keep the metric close to the specified value. To determine this value, the following equation can be used in combination with load testing:

SageMakerVariantInvocationsPerInstance = (MAX_RPS * SAFETY_FACTOR) * 60

Where MAX_RPS is the maximum requests per second that the model variant can handle without service degradation, SAFETY_FACTOR is a factor that ensures that the clients do not exceed the maximum RPS, and 60 is the conversion factor from seconds to minutes. In this case, the given parameters are:

MAX_RPS = 20 SAFETY_FACTOR = 0.5

Plugging these values into the equation, we get:

SageMakerVariantInvocationsPerInstance = (20 * 0.5) * 60 SageMakerVariantInvocationsPerInstance = 600

Therefore, the Specialist should set the SageMaker Variant Invocations Per Instance setting to 600.

Load testing your auto scaling configuration - Amazon SageMaker

Configure model auto scaling with the console - Amazon SageMaker

 Amazon SageMaker is a service that allows users to build, train, and deploy ML models on AWS. Amazon SageMaker endpoints are scalable and secure web services that can be used to perform real-time inference on ML models. An endpoint configuration defines the models that are deployed and the resources that are used by the endpoint. An endpoint configuration can have multiple production variants, each representing a different version or variant of a model. Users can specify the portion of the inferences served by each production variant using the initialVariantWeight parameter. Users can also programmatically update the endpoint configuration to change the portion of the inferences served by each production variant using the UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities API. Therefore, option B is the best solution to satisfy the requirements with minimal effort.

Option A is incorrect because creating multiple endpoints for each model would incur more cost and complexity than using a single endpoint with multiple production variants. Moreover, controlling the invocation of different models at the application layer would require more custom logic and coordination than using the UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities API. Option C is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Neo is a service that allows users to optimize ML models for different hardware platforms, such as edge devices. It is not relevant to the problem of running multiple versions of a model in parallel for long periods of time. Option D is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker batch transform is a service that allows users to perform asynchronous inference on large datasets. It is not suitable for the problem of performing real-time inference on streaming data from device users.

Deploying models to Amazon SageMaker hosting services - Amazon SageMaker

Update an Amazon SageMaker endpoint to accommodate new models - Amazon SageMaker

UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities - Amazon SageMaker

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

To build a robust serverless data lake on Amazon S3 that meets the requirements, the financial services company should use the following AWS services:

AWS Glue crawler: This is a service that connects to a data store, progresses through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for the data, and then creates metadata tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog1. The company can use an AWS Glue crawler to crawl the S3 data and infer the schema, format, and partition structure of the data. The crawler can also detect schema changes and update the metadata tables accordingly. This enables the company to support querying old and new data on Amazon S3 through Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum, which are serverless interactive query services that use the AWS Glue Data Catalog as a central location for storing and retrieving table metadata23.

AWS Lambda function: This is a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. You can also use AWS Lambda to create event-driven ETL pipelines, by triggering other AWS services based on events such as object creation or deletion in S3 buckets4. The company can use an AWS Lambda function to trigger an AWS Glue ETL job, which is a serverless way to extract, transform, and load data for analytics. The AWS Glue ETL job can perform various data processing tasks, such as converting data formats, filtering, aggregating, joining, and more.

AWS Glue Data Catalog: This is a managed service that acts as a central metadata repository for data assets across AWS and on-premises data sources. The AWS Glue Data Catalog provides a uniform repository where disparate systems can store and find metadata to keep track of data in data silos, and use that metadata to query and transform the data. The company can use the AWS Glue Data Catalog to search and discover metadata, such as table definitions, schemas, and partitions. The AWS Glue Data Catalog also integrates with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue ETL jobs, providing a consistent view of the data across different query and analysis services.

1: What Is a Crawler? - AWS Glue

2: What Is Amazon Athena? - Amazon Athena

3: Amazon Redshift Spectrum - Amazon Redshift

4: What is AWS Lambda? - AWS Lambda

AWS Glue ETL Jobs - AWS Glue

What Is the AWS Glue Data Catalog? - AWS Glue

The combination of steps that the data scientist must take to perform the A/B testing are to create a new endpoint configuration that includes a production variant for each of the two models, and update the existing endpoint to use the new endpoint configuration. This approach will allow the data scientist to deploy both models on the same endpoint and split the inference traffic between them based on a specified distribution.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides developers and data scientists the ability to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker supports A/B testing on machine learning models by allowing the data scientist to run multiple production variants on an endpoint. A production variant is a version of a model that is deployed on an endpoint. Each production variant has a name, a machine learning model, an instance type, an initial instance count, and an initial weight. The initial weight determines the percentage of inference requests that the variant will handle. For example, if there are two variants with weights of 0.5 and 0.5, each variant will handle 50% of the requests. The data scientist can use production variants to test models that have been trained using different training datasets, algorithms, and machine learning frameworks; test how they perform on different instance types; or a combination of all of the above1.

To perform A/B testing on machine learning models, the data scientist needs to create a new endpoint configuration that includes a production variant for each of the two models. An endpoint configuration is a collection of settings that define the properties of an endpoint, such as the name, the production variants, and the data capture configuration. The data scientist can use the Amazon SageMaker console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to create a new endpoint configuration. The data scientist needs to specify the name, model name, instance type, initial instance count, and initial variant weight for each production variant in the endpoint configuration2.

After creating the new endpoint configuration, the data scientist needs to update the existing endpoint to use the new endpoint configuration. Updating an endpoint is the process of deploying a new endpoint configuration to an existing endpoint. Updating an endpoint does not affect the availability or scalability of the endpoint, as Amazon SageMaker creates a new endpoint instance with the new configuration and switches the DNS record to point to the new instance when it is ready. The data scientist can use the Amazon SageMaker console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to update an endpoint. The data scientist needs to specify the name of the endpoint and the name of the new endpoint configuration to update the endpoint3.

The other options are either incorrect or unnecessary. Creating a new endpoint configuration that includes two target variants that point to different endpoints is not possible, as target variants are only used to invoke a specific variant on an endpoint, not to define an endpoint configuration. Deploying the new model to the existing endpoint would replace the existing model, not run it side-by-side with the new model. Updating the existing endpoint to activate the new model is not a valid operation, as there is no activation parameter for an endpoint.

1: A/B Testing ML models in production using Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

2: Create an Endpoint Configuration - Amazon SageMaker

3: Update an Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker script mode allows users to bring custom training scripts (such as train.py) without needing extensive modifications for specific data formats like TFRecord. By storing the TFRecord data in an Amazon S3 bucket and pointing the SageMaker training job to this bucket, the model can directly access the data, allowing the ML specialist to train the model without additional reformatting or data processing steps.

This approach minimizes development overhead and leverages SageMaker's built-in support for custom training scripts and S3 integration, making it the most efficient choice.

The correct solution for granting permissions for data preprocessing is to use the following steps:

Create an IAM role that has permissions to create Amazon SageMaker Processing jobs. Attach the role to the SageMaker notebook instance. This role allows the ML specialist to run Processing jobs from the notebook code1

Create an Amazon SageMaker Processing job with an IAM role that has read and write permissions to the relevant S3 bucket, and appropriate KMS and ECR permissions. This role allows the Processing job to access the data in the encrypted S3 bucket, decrypt it with the KMS CMK, and pull the container image from ECR23

The other options are incorrect because they either miss some permissions or use unnecessary steps. For example:

Option A uses a single IAM role for both the notebook instance and the Processing job. This role may have more permissions than necessary for the notebook instance, which violates the principle of least privilege4

Option C sets up both an S3 endpoint and a KMS endpoint in the default VPC. These endpoints are not required for the Processing job to access the data in the encrypted S3 bucket. They are only needed if the Processing job runs in network isolation mode, which is not specified in the question.

Option D uses the access key and secret key of the IAM user with appropriate KMS and ECR permissions. This is not a secure way to pass credentials to the Processing job. It also requires the ML specialist to manage the IAM user and the keys.

1: Create an Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instance - Amazon SageMaker

2: Create a Processing Job - Amazon SageMaker

3: Use AWS KMS–Managed Encryption Keys - Amazon Simple Storage Service

4: IAM Best Practices - AWS Identity and Access Management

Network Isolation - Amazon SageMaker

Understanding and Getting Your Security Credentials - AWS General Reference

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

 The best model for predicting housing prices based on a historical dataset with 32 features is linear regression. Linear regression is a supervised learning algorithm that fits a linear relationship between a dependent variable (housing price) and one or more independent variables (features). Linear regression can handle multiple features and output a continuous value for the housing price. Linear regression can also return the coefficients of the features, which indicate how each feature affects the housing price. Linear regression is suitable for this problem because the outcome of interest is numerical and continuous, and the model needs to capture the linear relationship between the features and the outcome.

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training - Regression vs Classification in Machine Learning

AWS Machine Learning Training - Linear Regression with Amazon SageMaker

The solution D meets the requirements with the least operational overhead because it uses Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, which is a fully managed service that automates the end-to-end process of building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Autopilot can handle data preprocessing, feature engineering, algorithm selection, hyperparameter tuning, and model deployment. The company only needs to create an IAM role for Amazon SageMaker with access to the S3 bucket, create a SageMaker AutoML job pointing to the bucket with the dataset, specify the price as the target attribute, and wait for the job to complete. Amazon SageMaker Autopilot will generate a list of candidate models with different configurations and performance metrics, and the company can deploy the best model for predictions1.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Creating a service-linked role for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with access to the S3 bucket, creating an ECS cluster based on an AWS Deep Learning Containers image, writing the code to perform the feature engineering, training a logistic regression model for predicting the price, and performing the inferences will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The company will have to manage the ECS cluster, the container image, the code, the model, and the inference endpoint. Moreover, logistic regression may not be the best algorithm for predicting the price, as it is more suitable for binary classification tasks2.

Option B: Creating an Amazon SageMaker notebook with a new IAM role that is associated with the notebook, pulling the dataset from the S3 bucket, exploring different combinations of feature engineering transformations, regression algorithms, and hyperparameters, comparing all the results in the notebook, and deploying the most accurate configuration in an endpoint for predictions will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The company will have to write the code for the feature engineering, the model training, the model evaluation, and the model deployment. The company will also have to manually compare the results and select the best configuration3.

Option C: Creating an IAM role with access to Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Lambda, creating a training job with the SageMaker built-in XGBoost model pointing to the bucket with the dataset, specifying the price as the target feature, loading the model artifact to a Lambda function for inference on prices of new houses will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The company will have to create and manage the Lambda function, the model artifact, and the inference endpoint. Moreover, XGBoost may not be the best algorithm for predicting the price, as it is more suitable for classification and ranking tasks4.

1: Amazon SageMaker Autopilot

2: Amazon Elastic Container Service

3: Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instances

4: Amazon SageMaker XGBoost Algorithm

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

The best way to ensure that required packages are automatically available on the notebook instance for the data scientist to use is to create an Amazon SageMaker lifecycle configuration with package installation commands and assign the lifecycle configuration to the notebook instance. A lifecycle configuration is a shell script that runs when you create or start a notebook instance. You can use a lifecycle configuration to customize the notebook instance by installing libraries, changing environment variables, or downloading datasets. You can also use a lifecycle configuration to automate the installation of custom Python packages that are not natively available on Amazon SageMaker.

Option A is incorrect because installing AWS Systems Manager Agent on the underlying Amazon EC2 instance and using Systems Manager Automation to execute the package installation commands is not a recommended way to customize the notebook instance. Systems Manager Automation is a feature that lets you safely automate common and repetitive IT operations and tasks across AWS resources. However, using Systems Manager Automation would require additional permissions and configurations, and it would not guarantee that the packages are installed before the notebook instance is ready to use.

Option B is incorrect because creating a Jupyter notebook file (.ipynb) with cells containing the package installation commands to execute and placing the file under the /etc/init directory of each Amazon SageMaker notebook instance is not a valid way to customize the notebook instance. The /etc/init directory is used to store scripts that are executed during the boot process of the operating system, not the Jupyter notebook application. Moreover, a Jupyter notebook file is not a shell script that can be executed by the operating system.

Option C is incorrect because using the conda package manager from within the Jupyter notebook console to apply the necessary conda packages to the default kernel of the notebook is not an automatic way to customize the notebook instance. This option would require the data scientist to manually run the conda commands every time they create or start a new notebook instance. This would not be efficient or convenient for the data scientist.

Customize a notebook instance using a lifecycle configuration script - Amazon SageMaker

AWS Systems Manager Automation - AWS Systems Manager

Conda environments - Amazon SageMaker

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

Principal component analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that attempts to reduce the dimensionality (number of features) within a dataset while still retaining as much information as possible. This is done by finding a new set of features called components, which are composites of the original features that are uncorrelated with one another. They are also constrained so that the first component accounts for the largest possible variability in the data, the second component the second most variability, and so on. By using PCA, the impact of having a large number of features that are highly correlated with each other can be reduced, as the new feature space will have fewer dimensions and less redundancy. This can make the linear models more stable and less prone to overfitting. References:

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Perform a large-scale principal component analysis faster using Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

Machine Learning- Prinicipal Component Analysis | i2tutorials

Amazon Personalize is a managed AWS service specifically designed to deliver personalized recommendations with minimal development time. It uses machine learning algorithms tailored for recommendation systems, making it highly suitable for applications where quick integration is essential. By using Amazon Personalize, the company can leverage existing customer data to generate real-time, personalized product recommendations that align better with customer preferences, enhancing the likelihood of customer engagement with recommended items.

Options involving EC2 instances with GPU or accelerated computing primarily enhance computational performance but do not inherently improve recommendation relevance, while Amazon SageMaker would require more development effort to achieve similar results.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that can perform part-of-speech tagging and key phrase extraction tasks. AWS Deep Learning Containers are Docker images that are pre-installed with popular deep learning frameworks such as Apache MXNet. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that can help build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Using Amazon Comprehend for the text preprocessing tasks and AWS Deep Learning Containers with Amazon SageMaker to build the custom classifier is the solution that can be built most quickly to meet the requirements.

Amazon Comprehend

AWS Deep Learning Containers

Amazon SageMaker

 To improve the test error for the image classifier, the Machine Learning Specialist should use the technique of increasing the training data by adding variation in rotation for training images. This technique is called data augmentation, which is a way of artificially expanding the size and diversity of the training dataset by applying various transformations to the original images, such as rotation, flipping, cropping, scaling, etc. Data augmentation can help the model learn more robust features that are invariant to the orientation, position, and size of the objects in the images. This can improve the generalization ability of the model and reduce the test error, especially for cases where the images are not well-aligned or have different perspectives1.

1: Image Augmentation - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that allows users to analyze streaming data in real time using SQL queries. Amazon Random Cut Forest (RCF) is a SQL extension that enables anomaly detection on streaming data. RCF is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that assigns an anomaly score to each data point based on how different it is from the rest of the data. A sliding window is a type of window that moves along with the data stream, so that the anomaly detection model can adapt to changing patterns over time. A tumbling window is a type of window that has a fixed size and does not overlap with other windows, so that the anomaly detection model is based on a fixed period of time. Therefore, option D is the best approach to meet the requirements of the question, as it uses RCF to calculate anomaly scores for each web traffic entry and uses a sliding window to adapt to changing web patterns over time.

Option A is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Random Cut Forest (RCF) is a built-in model that can be used to train and deploy anomaly detection models on batch or streaming data, but it requires more steps and resources than using the RCF SQL extension in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Option B is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker XGBoost is a built-in model that can be used for supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression, but not for unsupervised learning tasks such as anomaly detection. Option C is incorrect because k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) is a SQL extension that can be used for classification and regression tasks on streaming data, but not for anomaly detection. Moreover, using a tumbling window would not allow the anomaly detection model to adapt to changing web patterns over time.

Using CloudWatch anomaly detection

Anomaly Detection With CloudWatch

Performing Real-time Anomaly Detection using AWS

What Is AWS Anomaly Detection? (And Is There A Better Option?)

The data scientist should use K-means and principal component analysis (PCA) to meet this requirement. K-means is a clustering algorithm that can group customers based on their similarity in the feature space. PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that can transform the original 980 variables into a smaller set of uncorrelated variables that capture most of the variance in the data. This can help reduce the computational cost and noise in the data, and improve the performance of the clustering algorithm.

Clustering - Amazon SageMaker

Dimensionality Reduction - Amazon SageMaker

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

 Data augmentation is a technique that can increase the size and diversity of the training data by applying various transformations to the original images, such as inversions, translations, rotations, scaling, cropping, flipping, and color variations. Data augmentation can help improve the performance and generalization of image classification models by reducing overfitting and introducing more variability to the data. Data augmentation is especially useful when the original data is limited or imbalanced, as in the case of the company’s problem. By augmenting the training data for each item using image variants, the company can build a more robust and accurate model that can recognize the items on the store shelves from different angles, positions, and lighting conditions. The company can also iterate on the model by adding more data or fine-tuning the hyperparameters to achieve better results.

Build high performing image classification models using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart

The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning

Data augmentation for improving deep learning in image classification problem

Class-Adaptive Data Augmentation for Image Classification

The best option is to use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) with table mapping to select PostgreSQL tables with no sensitive data through an SSL connection. Replicate data directly into Amazon S3. This option meets the following requirements:

It ensures that only nonsensitive data is transferred to the cloud by using table mapping to filter out the tables that contain sensitive data1.

It uses IPsec to secure the data transfer by enabling SSL encryption for the AWS DMS endpoint2.

It uploads the data to Amazon S3 each day for model retraining by using the ongoing replication feature of AWS DMS3.

The other options are not as effective or feasible as the option above. Creating an AWS Glue job to connect to the PostgreSQL DB instance and ingest data through an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection directly into Amazon S3 is possible, but it requires more steps and resources than using AWS DMS. Also, it does not specify how to filter out the sensitive data from the tables. Creating an AWS Glue job to connect to the PostgreSQL DB instance and ingest all data through an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection into Amazon S3 while removing sensitive data using a PySpark job is also possible, but it is more complex and error-prone than using AWS DMS. Also, it does not use IPsec as required. Using PostgreSQL logical replication to replicate all data to PostgreSQL in Amazon EC2 through AWS Direct Connect with a VPN connection, and then using AWS Glue to move data from Amazon EC2 to Amazon S3 is not feasible, because PostgreSQL logical replication does not support replicating only a subset of data4. Also, it involves unnecessary data movement and additional costs.

Table mapping - AWS Database Migration Service

Using SSL to encrypt a connection to a DB instance - AWS Database Migration Service

Ongoing replication - AWS Database Migration Service

Logical replication - PostgreSQL

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 XGBoost model is a supervised machine learning algorithm, which means it requires labeled data to learn from. The customers’ current segmentation is unknown, so there is no label to train the XGBoost model on. Moreover, the XGBoost model is designed for classification or regression tasks, not for clustering. Clustering is a type of unsupervised machine learning, which means it does not require labeled data. Clustering algorithms try to find natural groups or clusters in the data based on their similarity or distance. A common clustering algorithm is k-means, which partitions the data into K clusters, where each data point belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean. To meet the current requirements, the data scientist should train a k-means model with K = 5 on the same dataset to predict a segment for each customer. This way, the data scientist can identify five customer segments based on age, income, and location, without needing any labels. References:

What is XGBoost? - Amazon SageMaker

What is Clustering? - Amazon SageMaker

K-Means Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

 The best option for using Spot Instances in a long-running Amazon EMR cluster is to use them for the task nodes. Task nodes are optional nodes that are used to increase the processing power of the cluster. They do not store any data and can be added or removed without affecting the cluster’s operation. Therefore, they are more resilient to interruptions caused by Spot Instance termination. Using Spot Instances for the master node or the core nodes is not recommended, as they store important data and metadata for the cluster. If they are terminated, the cluster may fail or lose data. References:

Amazon EMR on EC2 Spot Instances

Instance purchasing options - Amazon EMR

The problem described in the question is a case of underfitting, where the neural network model performs poorly on both the training and validation sets. This means that the model has not learned the features of the data well enough and has high bias. To solve this issue, the machine learning specialist should consider the following change:

Add more data to the training set and retrain the model using transfer learning to reduce the bias: Adding more data to the training set can help the model learn more patterns and variations in the data and improve its performance. Transfer learning can also help the model leverage the knowledge from the pre-trained network and adapt it to the new data. This can reduce the bias and increase the accuracy of the model.

Transfer learning for TensorFlow image classification models in Amazon SageMaker

Transfer learning for custom labels using a TensorFlow container and “bring your own algorithm” in Amazon SageMaker

Machine Learning Concepts - AWS Training and Certification

AWS Glue jobs is the AWS service or feature that will meet the requirements with the least development effort over time. AWS Glue jobs is a fully managed service that enables data engineers to run Apache Spark applications on a serverless Spark environment. AWS Glue jobs can perform batch preprocessing data transformations on large datasets stored in Amazon S3, such as converting data formats, filtering data, joining data, and aggregating data. AWS Glue jobs can also scale the Spark environment automatically based on the data volume and processing needs, without requiring any infrastructure provisioning or management. AWS Glue jobs can reduce the development effort and time by providing a graphical interface to create and monitor Spark applications, as well as a code generation feature that can generate Scala or Python code based on the data sources and targets. AWS Glue jobs can also integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker, to enable further data analysis and machine learning tasks1.

The other options are either more complex or less scalable than AWS Glue jobs. Amazon EMR cluster is a managed service that enables data engineers to run Apache Spark applications on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. However, Amazon EMR cluster requires more development effort and time than AWS Glue jobs, as it involves setting up, configuring, and managing the cluster, as well as writing and deploying the Spark code. Amazon EMR cluster also does not scale automatically, but requires manual or scheduled resizing of the cluster based on the data volume and processing needs2. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables data engineers to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. However, Amazon Athena is not suitable for performing complex data transformations, such as joining data from multiple sources, aggregating data, or applying custom logic. Amazon Athena is also not designed for running Spark applications, but only supports SQL queries3. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that enables data engineers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. However, AWS Lambda is not optimized for running Spark applications, as it has limitations on the execution time, memory size, and concurrency of the functions. AWS Lambda is also not integrated with Amazon S3, and requires additional steps to read and write data from S3 buckets.

1: AWS Glue - Fully Managed ETL Service - Amazon Web Services

2: Amazon EMR - Amazon Web Services

3: Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3

[4]: AWS Lambda – Serverless Compute - Amazon Web Services

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.

The correct solution for updating the software on a SageMaker notebook instance is to stop and then restart the notebook instance. This will automatically apply the latest security and software updates provided by SageMaker1

The other options are incorrect because they either do not update the software or require unnecessary steps. For example:

Option A calls the CreateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig API operation. This operation creates a lifecycle configuration, which is a set of shell scripts that run when a notebook instance is created or started. A lifecycle configuration can be used to customize the notebook instance, such as installing additional libraries or packages. However, it does not update the software on the notebook instance2

Option B creates a new SageMaker notebook instance and mounts the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume from the original instance. This option will create a new notebook instance with the latest software, but it will also incur additional costs and require manual steps to transfer the data and settings from the original instance3

Option D calls the UpdateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig API operation. This operation updates an existing lifecycle configuration. As explained in option A, a lifecycle configuration does not update the software on the notebook instance4

1: Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instances - Amazon SageMaker

2: CreateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig - Amazon SageMaker

3: Create a Notebook Instance - Amazon SageMaker

4: UpdateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker Experiments is a service that helps track, compare, and evaluate different iterations of ML models. It can be used to capture key parameters such as the number of features and the sample count from a PySpark script that runs as a SageMaker processing job. A SageMaker processing job is a flexible and scalable way to run data processing workloads on AWS, such as feature engineering, data validation, model evaluation, and model interpretation.

Amazon SageMaker Experiments

Process Data and Evaluate Models

 The problem described in the question is a case of overfitting, where the neural network model performs well on the training data but poorly on the test data. This means that the model has learned the noise and specific patterns of the training data, but cannot generalize to new and unseen data. To solve this issue, the Specialist should consider the following changes:

Choose a lower number of layers: Reducing the number of layers can reduce the complexity and capacity of the neural network model, making it less prone to overfitting. A model with 50 hidden layers is likely too deep for the given data size and task. A simpler model with fewer layers can learn the essential features of the data without memorizing the noise.

Enable dropout: Dropout is a regularization technique that randomly drops out some units in the neural network during training. This prevents the units from co-adapting too much and forces the model to learn more robust features. Dropout can improve the generalization and test performance of the model by reducing overfitting.

Enable early stopping: Early stopping is another regularization technique that monitors the validation error during training and stops the training process when the validation error stops decreasing or starts increasing. This prevents the model from overtraining on the training data and reduces overfitting.

Deep Learning - Machine Learning Lens

How to Avoid Overfitting in Deep Learning Neural Networks

How to Identify Overfitting Machine Learning Models in Scikit-Learn

The best solution for text extraction and entity detection with the least amount of effort is to use Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend. These services are:

Amazon Textract for text extraction from receipt images. Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that can automatically extract text and data from scanned documents. It can handle different structures and formats of documents, such as PDF, TIFF, PNG, and JPEG, without any preprocessing steps. It can also extract key-value pairs and tables from documents1

Amazon Comprehend for entity detection and custom entity detection. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that can identify entities, such as dates, locations, and notes, from unstructured text. It can also detect custom entities, such as receipt numbers, by using a custom entity recognizer that can be trained with a small amount of labeled data2

The other options are not suitable because they either require more effort for text extraction, entity detection, or custom entity detection. For example:

Option A uses the Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm to train on the text for entities and custom entities. BlazingText is a supervised learning algorithm that can perform text classification and word2vec. It requires users to provide a large amount of labeled data, preprocess the data into a specific format, and tune the hyperparameters of the model3

Option B uses a deep learning OCR model from the AWS Marketplace and a NER deep learning model for text extraction and entity detection. These models are pre-trained and may not be suitable for the specific use case of receipt processing. They also require users to deploy and manage the models on Amazon SageMaker or Amazon EC2 instances4

Option D uses a deep learning OCR model from the AWS Marketplace for text extraction. This model has the same drawbacks as option B. It also requires users to integrate the model output with Amazon Comprehend for entity detection and custom entity detection.

1: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from documents

2: Amazon Comprehend – Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML)

3: BlazingText - Amazon SageMaker

4: AWS Marketplace: OCR

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

For a model with low accuracy on both training and testing datasets, the following two strategies are effective:

Increase the number of passes and perform hyperparameter tuning: This approach allows the model to better learn from the existing data and improve performance through optimized hyperparameters.

Add domain-specific features and use more complex models: Adding relevant features that capture additional information from domain knowledge and using more complex model architectures can help the model capture patterns better, potentially improving accuracy.

Options B, D, and E would either reduce feature complexity or training data volume, which is less likely to improve performance when accuracy is low on both training and testing sets.

Mini-batch gradient descent is a variant of gradient descent that updates the model parameters using a subset of the training data (called a mini-batch) at each iteration. The learning rate is a hyperparameter that controls how much the model parameters change in response to the gradient. If the learning rate is very high, the model parameters may overshoot the optimal values and oscillate around the minimum of the cost function. This can cause the training accuracy to fluctuate and prevent the model from converging to a stable solution. To avoid this issue, the learning rate should be chosen carefully, such as by using a learning rate decay schedule or an adaptive learning rate algorithm1. Alternatively, the batch size can be increased to reduce the variance of the gradient estimates2. However, the batch size should not be too big, as this can slow down the training process and reduce the generalization ability of the model3. Dataset shuffling and class distribution are not likely to cause oscillations in training accuracy, as they do not affect the gradient updates directly. Dataset shuffling can help avoid getting stuck in local minima and improve the convergence speed of mini-batch gradient descent4. Class distribution can affect the performance and fairness of the model, especially if the dataset is imbalanced, but it does not necessarily cause fluctuations in training accuracy.

AWS IoT Greengrass is a service that extends AWS to edge devices, such as sensors and machines, so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage. AWS IoT Greengrass enables local device messaging, secure data transfer, and local computing using AWS Lambda functions and machine learning models. AWS IoT Greengrass can run machine learning inference locally on devices using models that are created and trained in the cloud. This allows devices to respond quickly to local events, even when they are offline or have intermittent connectivity. Therefore, option B is the best deployment architecture for the model to address the business requirements of the manufacturer.

Option A is incorrect because deploying the model in Amazon SageMaker would require sending the sensor data to the cloud for inference, which would not work well for factory locations that do not have reliable or high-speed internet connectivity. Moreover, this option would not provide near-real-time inference capabilities, as there would be latency and bandwidth issues involved in transferring the data to and from the cloud. Option C is incorrect because deploying the model to an Amazon SageMaker batch transformation job would not provide near-real-time inference capabilities, as batch transformation is an asynchronous process that operates on large datasets. Batch transformation is not suitable for streaming data that requires low-latency responses. Option D is incorrect because deploying the model in Amazon SageMaker and using an IoT rule to write data to an Amazon DynamoDB table would also require sending the sensor data to the cloud for inference, which would have the same drawbacks as option A. Moreover, this option would introduce additional complexity and cost by involving multiple services, such as IoT Core, DynamoDB, and Lambda.

AWS Greengrass Machine Learning Inference - Amazon Web Services

Machine learning components - AWS IoT Greengrass

What is AWS Greengrass? | AWS IoT Core | Onica

GitHub - aws-samples/aws-greengrass-ml-deployment-sample

AWS IoT Greengrass Architecture and Its Benefits | Quick Guide - XenonStack

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.

 The ML specialist should run the Model Monitor baseline job again on the new training set and configure Model Monitor to use the new baseline. This is because the baseline job computes the statistics and constraints for the data quality and model quality metrics, which are used to detect violations. If the training set changes, the baseline job should be updated accordingly to reflect the new distribution of the data and the model performance. Otherwise, the old baseline may not be representative of the current production traffic and may cause false alarms or miss violations. References:

Monitor data and model quality - Amazon SageMaker

Detecting and analyzing incorrect model predictions with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and Debugger | AWS Machine Learning Blog

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.

The best approach to identify and visualize the natural groupings for the numerical columns across all customers is to embed the numerical features using the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) algorithm and create a scatter plot. t-SNE is a dimensionality reduction technique that can project high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional space, while preserving the local structure and distances of the data points. A scatter plot can then show the clusters of data points in the reduced space, where each point represents a customer and the color indicates the cluster membership. This approach can help the Specialist quickly explore the patterns and similarities among the customers based on their numerical features.

The other options are not as effective or efficient as the t-SNE approach. Running k-means for different values of k and creating an elbow plot can help determine the optimal number of clusters, but it does not provide a visual representation of the clusters or the customers. Embedding the numerical features using t-SNE and creating a line graph does not make sense, as a line graph is used to show the change of a variable over time, not the distribution of data points in a space. Running k-means for different values of k and creating box plots for each numerical column within each cluster can provide some insights into the statistics of each cluster, but it is very time-consuming and cumbersome to create and compare thousands of box plots. References:

Dimensionality Reduction - Amazon SageMaker

Visualize high dimensional data using t-SNE - Amazon SageMaker

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

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that enables you to analyze streaming data in real time using SQL or Apache Flink applications. You can use Kinesis Data Analytics to process and gain insights from data streams such as web logs, clickstreams, IoT data, and more.

To use SQL to query a data stream of GZIP files, you need to first transform the data into a format that Kinesis Data Analytics can understand, such as JSON, CSV, or Apache Parquet. You can use an AWS Lambda function to perform this transformation and send the output to a Kinesis data stream that is connected to your Kinesis Data Analytics application. This way, you can use SQL to query the stream with the least latency, as Lambda functions are triggered in near real time by the incoming data and Kinesis Data Analytics can process the data as soon as it arrives.

The other options are not optimal for this scenario, as they introduce more latency or complexity. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that can perform ETL (extract, transform, and load) tasks on data sources, but it is not designed for real-time streaming data analysis. An Amazon Kinesis Client Library is a Java library that enables you to build custom applications that process data from Kinesis data streams, but it requires more coding and configuration than using a Lambda function. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service that can deliver streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Splunk, but it does not support SQL queries on the data.

What Is Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL Applications?

Using AWS Lambda with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Using AWS Lambda with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

The SageMaker image classification algorithm supports both RecordIO and image content types for training in file mode, and supports the RecordIO content type for training in pipe mode1. However, the algorithm also supports training in pipe mode using the image files without creating RecordIO files, by using the augmented manifest format2. In this case, the company should generate

 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 goal of classification is to determine to which class or category a data point (customer in our case) belongs to. For classification problems, data scientists would use historical data with predefined target variables AKA labels (churner/non-churner) – answers that need to be predicted – to train an algorithm. With classification, businesses can answer the following questions:

Will this customer churn or not?

Will a customer renew their subscription?

Will a user downgrade a pricing plan?

Are there any signs of unusual customer behavior?

 The best way to address the overfitting problem in image classification is to increase the dropout rate at the flatten layer because the model is not generalized enough. Dropout is a regularization technique that randomly drops out some units from the neural network during training, reducing the co-adaptation of features and preventing overfitting. The flatten layer is the layer that converts the output of the convolutional layers into a one-dimensional vector that can be fed into the dense layers. Increasing the dropout rate at the flatten layer means that more features from the convolutional layers will be ignored, forcing the model to learn more robust and generalizable representations from the remaining features.

The other options are not correct for this scenario because:

Increasing the learning rate would not help with the overfitting problem, as it would make the optimization process more unstable and prone to overshooting the global minimum. A high learning rate can also cause the model to diverge or oscillate around the optimal solution, resulting in poor performance and accuracy.

Increasing the dimensionality of the dense layer next to the flatten layer would not help with the overfitting problem, as it would make the model more complex and increase the number of parameters to be learned. A more complex model can fit the training data better, but it can also memorize the noise and irrelevant details in the data, leading to overfitting and poor generalization.

Increasing the epoch number would not help with the overfitting problem, as it would make the model train longer and more likely to overfit the training data. A high epoch number can cause the model to converge to the global minimum, but it can also cause the model to over-optimize the training data and lose the ability to generalize to new data.

Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting

How to Reduce Overfitting With Dropout Regularization in Keras

How to Control the Stability of Training Neural Networks With the Learning Rate

How to Choose the Number of Hidden Layers and Nodes in a Feedforward Neural Network?

How to decide the optimal number of epochs to train a neural network?

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

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

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.

Switching to an instance type that has a CPU: GPU ratio of 6:1 will reduce the training costs by using fewer CPUs and GPUs, while maintaining the same level of performance. The GPU idle time indicates that the CPU is not able to feed the GPU with enough data, so reducing the CPU: GPU ratio will balance the workload and improve the GPU utilization. A lower CPU: GPU ratio also means less overhead for inter-process communication and synchronization between the CPU and GPU processes. References:

Optimizing GPU utilization for AI/ML workloads on Amazon EC2

Analyze CPU vs. GPU Performance for AWS Machine Learning

 The solution A and C are the most effective in solving the issue while keeping costs to a minimum. The solution A and C involve the following steps:

Configure the endpoint to use Amazon Elastic Inference (EI) accelerators. This will enable the company to reduce the cost and latency of running TensorFlow inference on SageMaker. Amazon EI provides GPU-powered acceleration for deep learning models without requiring the use of GPU instances. Amazon EI can attach to any SageMaker instance type and provide the right amount of acceleration based on the workload1.

Configure the endpoint to automatically scale with the Invocations Per Instance metric. This will enable the company to adjust the number of instances based on the demand and traffic patterns of the website. The Invocations Per Instance metric measures the average number of requests that each instance processes over a period of time. By using this metric, the company can scale out the endpoint when the load increases and scale in when the load decreases. This can improve the response time and availability of the product recommendation engine2.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option B: Creating a new endpoint configuration with two production variants will not solve the issue of increasing response time and errors. Production variants are used to split the traffic between different models or versions of the same model. They can be useful for testing, updating, or A/B testing models. However, they do not provide any scaling or acceleration benefits for the inference workload3.

Option D: Deploying a second instance pool to support a blue/green deployment of models will not solve the issue of increasing response time and errors. Blue/green deployment is a technique for updating models without downtime or disruption. It involves creating a new endpoint configuration with a different instance pool and model version, and then shifting the traffic from the old endpoint to the new endpoint gradually. However, this technique does not provide any scaling or acceleration benefits for the inference workload4.

Option E: Reconfiguring the endpoint to use burstable instances will not solve the issue of increasing response time and errors. Burstable instances are instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline when needed. They can be useful for workloads that have moderate CPU utilization and occasional spikes. However, they are not suitable for workloads that have high and consistent CPU utilization, such as the product recommendation engine. Moreover, burstable instances may incur additional charges when they exceed their CPU credits5.

1: Amazon Elastic Inference

2: How to Scale Amazon SageMaker Endpoints

3: Deploying Models to Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services

4: Updating Models in Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services

5: Burstable Performance Instances

Amazon Fraud Detector is a managed service designed to detect potentially fraudulent online activities, such as transactions. It uses machine learning and business rules to classify activities as fraudulent or legitimate, minimizing the need for custom model training. By using the Amazon Fraud Detector prediction API, the company can automatically approve or reject transactions flagged as fraudulent, implementing an efficient risk mitigation strategy without extensive operational effort.

This approach requires minimal setup and effectively allows the company to block fraudulent transactions with high confidence, addressing the business's need to balance risk mitigation and customer impact.

The most cost-effective solution is to use an S3 event to trigger a Lambda function that uses SageMaker Data Wrangler to merge the data. This solution avoids the need to provision and manage any additional resources, such as Kinesis streams, Firehose delivery streams, Glue jobs, or Redshift clusters. SageMaker Data Wrangler provides a visual interface to import, prepare, transform, and analyze data from various sources, including AWS Data Exchange products. It can also export the data preparation workflow to a Python script that can be executed by a Lambda function. This solution can meet the time requirement of 30-60 minutes, depending on the size and complexity of the data.

Using Amazon S3 Event Notifications

Prepare ML Data with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler

AWS Lambda Function

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.

Clustering is a machine learning technique that can group data points into clusters based on their similarity or proximity. Clustering can help discover the underlying structure and patterns in the data, as well as identify outliers or anomalies. Clustering can also be used for customer segmentation, which is the process of dividing customers into groups based on their characteristics, behaviors, preferences, or needs. Customer segmentation can help understand the key features and needs of different customer segments, as well as design and implement targeted marketing campaigns for each segment. In this case, the Marketing Manager at a pet insurance company plans to launch a targeted marketing campaign on social media to acquire new customers. To do this, the Manager can use clustering on customer profile data to understand the key characteristics of consumer segments, such as their demographics, pet types, policy preferences, premiums paid, claims made, etc. The Manager can then find similar profiles on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., by using the cluster features as filters or keywords. The Manager can then target these potential new customers with personalized and relevant ads or offers that match their segment’s needs and interests. This way, the Manager can implement a machine learning model to identify potential new customers on social media.

Using log-scaled hyperparameters is a guideline that can improve the automatic model tuning in Amazon SageMaker. Log-scaled hyperparameters are hyperparameters that have values that span several orders of magnitude, such as learning rate, regularization parameter, or number of hidden units. Log-scaled hyperparameters can be specified by using a log-uniform distribution, which assigns equal probability to each order of magnitude within a range. For example, a log-uniform distribution between 0.001 and 1000 can sample values such as 0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, or 1000 with equal probability. Using log-scaled hyperparameters can allow the hyperparameter optimization feature to search the hyperparameter space more efficiently and effectively, as it can explore different scales of values and avoid sampling values that are too small or too large. Using log-scaled hyperparameters can also help avoid numerical issues, such as underflow or overflow, that may occur when using linear-scaled hyperparameters. Using log-scaled hyperparameters can be done by setting the ScalingType parameter to Logarithmic when defining the hyperparameter ranges in Amazon SageMaker12

The other options are not valid or relevant guidelines for improving the automatic model tuning in Amazon SageMaker. Choosing the maximum number of hyperparameters supported by Amazon SageMaker to search the largest number of combinations possible is not a good practice, as it can increase the time and cost of the tuning job and make it harder to find the optimal values. Amazon SageMaker supports up to 20 hyperparameters for tuning, but it is recommended to choose only the most important and influential hyperparameters for the model and algorithm, and use default or fixed values for the rest3 Specifying a very large hyperparameter range to allow Amazon SageMaker to cover every possible value is not a good practice, as it can result in sampling values that are irrelevant or impractical for the model and algorithm, and waste the tuning budget. It is recommended to specify a reasonable and realistic hyperparameter range based on the prior knowledge and experience of the model and algorithm, and use the results of the tuning job to refine the range if needed4 Executing only one hyperparameter tuning job at a time and improving tuning through successive rounds of experiments is not a good practice, as it can limit the exploration and exploitation of the hyperparameter space and make the tuning process slower and less efficient. It is recommended to use parallelism and concurrency to run multiple training jobs simultaneously and leverage the Bayesian optimization algorithm that Amazon SageMaker uses to guide the search for the best hyperparameter values5

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

To control data egress from SageMaker, the ML engineer can use the following mechanisms:

Connect to SageMaker by using a VPC interface endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink. This allows the ML engineer to access SageMaker services and resources without exposing the traffic to the public internet. This reduces the risk of data leakage and unauthorized access1

Enable network isolation for training jobs and models. This prevents the training jobs and models from accessing the internet or other AWS services. This ensures that the data used for training and inference is not exposed to external sources2

Protect data with encryption at rest and in transit. Use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to manage encryption keys. This enables the ML engineer to encrypt the data stored in Amazon S3 buckets, SageMaker notebook instances, and SageMaker endpoints. It also allows the ML engineer to encrypt the data in transit between SageMaker and other AWS services. This helps protect the data from unauthorized access and tampering3

The other options are not effective in controlling data egress from SageMaker:

Use SCPs to restrict access to SageMaker. SCPs are used to define the maximum permissions for an organization or organizational unit (OU) in AWS Organizations. They do not control the data egress from SageMaker, but rather the access to SageMaker itself4

Disable root access on the SageMaker notebook instances. This prevents the users from installing additional packages or libraries on the notebook instances. It does not prevent the data from being transferred out of the notebook instances.

Restrict notebook presigned URLs to specific IPs used by the company. This limits the access to the notebook instances from certain IP addresses. It does not prevent the data from being transferred out of the notebook instances.

1: Amazon SageMaker Interface VPC Endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) - Amazon SageMaker

2: Network Isolation - Amazon SageMaker

3: Encrypt Data at Rest and in Transit - Amazon SageMaker

4: Using Service Control Policies - AWS Organizations

Disable Root Access - Amazon SageMaker

Create a Presigned Notebook Instance URL - Amazon SageMaker

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 for this scenario is to set up an AWS Glue job that has the Amazon Redshift cluster as the source and the S3 bucket as the destination, and use the built-in transforms Filter, Map, and RenameField to perform the required transformations. This solution has the following advantages:

It minimizes the effort that is needed to set up infrastructure for the ingestion and transformation, as AWS Glue is a fully managed service that provides a serverless Apache Spark environment, a graphical interface to define data sources and targets, and a code generation feature to create and edit scripts1.

It automates the extraction and transformation process, as AWS Glue can schedule the job to run monthly, and handle the connection, authentication, and configuration of the Amazon Redshift cluster and the S3 bucket2.

It minimizes the load on the Amazon Redshift cluster, as AWS Glue can read the data from the cluster in parallel and use a JDBC connection that supports SSL encryption3.

It performs the required transformations, as AWS Glue can use the built-in transforms Filter, Map, and RenameField to remove the rows with NULL values, split the timestamp column into date and time columns, and rename the card name column, respectively4.

The other solutions are not optimal or suitable, because they have the following drawbacks:

A: Setting up an Amazon EMR cluster and creating an Apache Spark job to read the data from the Amazon Redshift cluster and transform the data is not the most efficient or convenient solution, as it requires more effort and resources to provision, configure, and manage the EMR cluster, and to write and maintain the Spark code5.

B: Setting up an Amazon EC2 instance with a SQL client tool to query the data from the Amazon Redshift cluster directly and export the resulting dataset into a CSV file is not a scalable or reliable solution, as it depends on the availability and performance of the EC2 instance, and the manual execution and upload of the SQL queries and the CSV file6.

D: Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to run a query that writes the data directly to the S3 bucket and creating an AWS Lambda function to run the query monthly is not a feasible solution, as Amazon Redshift Spectrum does not support writing data to external tables or S3 buckets, only reading data from them7.

1: What Is AWS Glue? - AWS Glue

2: Populating the Data Catalog - AWS Glue

3: Best Practices When Using AWS Glue with Amazon Redshift - AWS Glue

4: Built-In Transforms - AWS Glue

5: What Is Amazon EMR? - Amazon EMR

6: Amazon EC2 - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

7: Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to Query External Data - Amazon Redshift

The data scientist should adjust hyperparameters related to the attention mechanism to resolve the problem. The attention mechanism is a technique that allows the decoder to focus on different parts of the input sequence when generating the output sequence. It helps the model cope with long input sequences and improve the translation quality. The Amazon SageMaker seq2seq algorithm supports different types of attention mechanisms, such as dot, general, concat, and mlp. The data scientist can use the hyperparameter attention_type to choose the type of attention mechanism. The data scientist can also use the hyperparameter attention_coverage_type to enable coverage, which is a mechanism that penalizes the model for attending to the same input positions repeatedly. By adjusting these hyperparameters, the data scientist can fine-tune the attention mechanism and reduce the number of false negative predictions by the model.

Sequence-to-Sequence Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Attention Mechanism - Sockeye Documentation

Forecasting is a type of machine learning model that predicts future values of a target variable based on historical data and other features. Forecasting is suitable for problems that involve time-series data, such as the number of claims in each category from month to month. Forecasting can handle multiple categories of the target variable, as well as missing or partial information on some features. Therefore, option C is the best choice for the given problem.

Option A is incorrect because classification is a type of machine learning model that assigns a label to an input based on predefined categories. Classification is not suitable for predicting continuous or numerical values, such as the number of claims in each category from month to month. Moreover, classification requires sufficient and complete information on the features that are relevant to the target variable, which is not the case for the given problem. Option B is incorrect because reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning model that learns from its own actions and rewards in an interactive environment. Reinforcement learning is not suitable for problems that involve historical data and do not require an agent to take actions. Option D is incorrect because it combines two different types of machine learning models, which is unnecessary and inefficient. Moreover, classification is not suitable for predicting the number of claims in some categories, as explained in option A.

Forecasting | AWS Solutions for Machine Learning (AI/ML) | AWS Solutions Library

Time Series Forecasting Service – Amazon Forecast – Amazon Web Services

Amazon Forecast: Guide to Predicting Future Outcomes - Onica

Amazon Launches What-If Analyses for Machine Learning Forecasting …

Image classification is a machine learning task that involves assigning labels to images based on their content. Image classification can be performed using various algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are a type of deep learning model that can learn to extract high-level features from images. To train a customized image classification model, the e-commerce company needs a compute choice that can support the high computational demands of deep learning and provide good accuracy on the model quickly. A GPU accelerated computing instance, such as p3.2xlarge, is a suitable choice for this task, as it can leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs to speed up the training process and reduce the training time. A p3.2xlarge instance has one NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU, which can provide up to 125 teraflops of mixed-precision performance and 16 GB of GPU memory. A p3.2xlarge instance can also use various deep learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, etc., to build and train the image classification model. A p3.2xlarge instance is also more cost-effective than a p3.8xlarge instance, which has four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, as the latter may not be necessary for a proof of concept with a small dataset. Therefore, the Machine Learning Specialist should select p3.2xlarge as the compute choice to train and achieve good accuracy on the model quickly.

Amazon EC2 P3 Instances - Amazon Web Services

Image Classification - Amazon SageMaker

Convolutional Neural Networks - Amazon SageMaker

Deep Learning AMIs - Amazon Web Services

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

The best approaches to decrease the training time of the model are C and D, because they can improve the computational efficiency and parallelization of the training process. These approaches have the following benefits:

C: Replacing CPU-based EC2 instances with GPU-based EC2 instances can speed up the training of the DeepAR algorithm, as it can leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs to perform matrix operations and gradient computations faster than CPUs12. The DeepAR algorithm supports GPU-based EC2 instances such as ml.p2 and ml.p33.

D: Using multiple training instances can also reduce the training time of the DeepAR algorithm, as it can distribute the workload across multiple nodes and perform data parallelism4. The DeepAR algorithm supports distributed training with multiple CPU-based or GPU-based EC2 instances3.

The other options are not effective or relevant, because they have the following drawbacks:

A: Replacing On-Demand Instances with Spot Instances can reduce the cost of the training, but not necessarily the time, as Spot Instances are subject to interruption and availability5. Moreover, the DeepAR algorithm does not support checkpointing, which means that the training cannot resume from the last saved state if the Spot Instance is terminated3.

B: Configuring model auto scaling dynamically to adjust the number of instances automatically is not applicable, as this feature is only available for inference endpoints, not for training jobs6.

E: Using a pre-trained version of the model and running incremental training is not possible, as the DeepAR algorithm does not support incremental training or transfer learning3. The DeepAR algorithm requires a full retraining of the model whenever new data is added or the hyperparameters are changed7.

1: GPU vs CPU: What Matters Most for Machine Learning? | by Louis (What’s AI) Bouchard | Towards Data Science

2: How GPUs Accelerate Machine Learning Training | NVIDIA Developer Blog

3: DeepAR Forecasting Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

4: Distributed Training - Amazon SageMaker

5: Managed Spot Training - Amazon SageMaker

6: Automatic Scaling - Amazon SageMaker

7: How the DeepAR Algorithm Works - Amazon SageMaker

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]

SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning (AMT) is a fully managed hyperparameter optimization feature that finds the best values for model parameters like eta, alpha, min_child_weight, and max_depth.

“Use SageMaker automatic model tuning to find the best version of a model by running many training jobs on your dataset using the ranges of hyperparameters that you specify.”

It supports built-in algorithms like XGBoost, and can optimize for evaluation metrics like AUC, making it the least operational overhead solution for this task.

When an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance needs to access encrypted data in Amazon S3, the ML specialist must ensure that both Amazon S3 access permissions and AWS Key Management Service (KMS) decryption permissions are properly configured. The dataset in this scenario is stored with server-side encryption using an AWS KMS key (SSE-KMS), so the following steps are necessary:

S3 Read Permissions: Attach an IAM role to the SageMaker notebook instance with permissions that allow the s3:GetObject action for the specific S3 bucket storing the data. This will allow the notebook instance to read data from Amazon S3.

KMS Key Policy Permissions: Grant permissions in the KMS key policy to the IAM role assigned to the SageMaker notebook instance. This allows SageMaker to use the KMS key to decrypt data in the S3 bucket.

These steps ensure the SageMaker notebook instance can access the encrypted data stored in S3. The AWS documentation emphasizes that to access SSE-KMS encrypted data, the SageMaker notebook requires appropriate permissions in both the S3 bucket policy and the KMS key policy, making Option C the correct and secure approach.

 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

 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

 In this scenario, the specialist should use one-hot encoding and RGB encoding to allow the regression model to learn from the Wall_Color data. One-hot encoding is a technique used to convert categorical data into numerical data. It creates new columns that store one-hot representation of colors. For example, a variable named color has three categories: red, green, and blue. After one-hot encoding, the new variables should be like this:

One-hot encoding can capture the presence or absence of a color, but it cannot capture the intensity or hue of a color. RGB encoding is a technique used to represent colors in a digital image. It creates three columns to encode the color in RGB format. For example, a variable named color has three categories: red, green, and blue. After RGB encoding, the new variables should be like this:

RGB encoding can capture the intensity and hue of a color, but it may also introduce correlation among the three columns. Therefore, using both one-hot encoding and RGB encoding can provide more information to the regression model than using either one alone.

Feature Engineering for Categorical Data

How to Perform Feature Selection with Categorical Data

To adapt a previously trained model to a new but related task efficiently, the best practice is to leverage transfer learning. This involves retaining the learned features from the earlier model and only retraining the final layers to accommodate the new classification categories.​

In the context of a hybrid architecture combining a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN):​

CNN Component: The CNN is responsible for extracting spatial features from video frames. Since the early layers of a CNN capture generic features like edges and textures, they are often transferable across tasks. Therefore, only the last fully connected layer, which maps these features to specific object classes, needs to be reinitialized and retrained for the new set of objects.​

RNN Component: The RNN handles the temporal dynamics of the sequence data. Similar to the CNN, the earlier layers of the RNN capture general sequence patterns. Thus, reinitializing and retraining only the last layer of the RNN allows the model to adapt to the new prediction task without the need to retrain the entire network.​

This approach minimizes training time and computational resources while effectively adapting the model to new tasks.

The company should configure Amazon Textract to route low-confidence predictions to Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I). Amazon A2I is a service that allows you to implement human review of machine learning (ML) predictions. It also comes integrated with some of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) services such as Amazon Textract. By using Amazon A2I, the company can perform a manual review on those words that have low confidence scores before performing a business validation. This will help reduce the processing time of loan applications by avoiding errors and rework.

Option A is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is not a suitable service for human review of Amazon Textract predictions. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is a service that helps you build highly accurate training datasets for machine learning. It allows you to label your own data or use a workforce of human labelers. However, it does not provide an easy way to integrate with Amazon Textract and route low-confidence predictions for human review.

Option B is incorrect because using an Amazon Textract synchronous operation instead of an asynchronous operation will not reduce the processing time of loan applications. A synchronous operation is a request-response operation that returns the results immediately. An asynchronous operation is a start-and-check operation that returns a job identifier that you can use to check the status and results later. The choice of operation depends on the size and complexity of the document, not on the confidence of the predictions.

Option D is incorrect because using Amazon Rekognition’s feature to detect text in an image to extract the data from scanned images is not a better alternative than using Amazon Textract. Amazon Rekognition is a service that provides computer vision capabilities, such as face recognition, object detection, and scene analysis. It can also detect text in an image, but it does not provide the same level of accuracy and functionality as Amazon Textract. Amazon Textract can not only detect text, but also extract data from tables and forms, and understand the layout and structure of the document.

Amazon Augmented AI

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth

Amazon Textract Operations

Amazon Rekognition

A sequential split is a method of splitting data into training and evaluation datasets while preserving the order of the data records. This method is useful when the data has a temporal or sequential structure, and the order of the data matters for the prediction task. For example, if the data contains sales data for different months or years, and the goal is to predict the sales for the next month or year, a sequential split can ensure that the training data comes from the earlier period and the evaluation data comes from the later period. This can help avoid data leakage, which occurs when the training data contains information from the future that is not available at the time of prediction. A sequential split can also help evaluate the model performance on the most recent data, which may be more relevant and representative of the future data.

In this question, Example Corp has sequential sales data from the past 15 years and wants to use Amazon ML to predict the sales for this year’s upcoming annual sale event. A sequential split is the most appropriate method for splitting the data, as it can preserve the order of the data and prevent data leakage. For example, Example Corp can use the data from the first 14 years as the training dataset, and the data from the last year as the evaluation dataset. This way, the model can learn from the historical data and be tested on the most recent data.

Amazon ML provides an option to split the data sequentially when creating the training and evaluation datasources. To use this option, Example Corp can specify the percentage of the data to use for training and evaluation, and Amazon ML will use the first part of the data for training and the remaining part of the data for evaluation. For more information, see Splitting Your Data - Amazon Machine Learning.

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

The best storage option for the trucking company is to use an Amazon S3-backed data lake to store the raw images, and set up the permissions using bucket policies. A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. Amazon S3 is the ideal choice for building a data lake because it offers high durability, scalability, availability, and security. You can store any type of data in Amazon S3, such as images, videos, audio, text, etc. You can also use AWS services such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon EMR to analyze and process the data in the data lake. To ensure the data is only accessible to specific IAM users, you can use bucket policies to grant or deny access to the S3 buckets based on the IAM user’s identity or role. Bucket policies are JSON documents that specify the permissions for the bucket and the objects in it. You can use conditions to restrict access based on various factors, such as IP address, time, source, etc. By using bucket policies, you can control who can access the data in the data lake and what actions they can perform on it.

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training - Build a Data Lake Foundation with Amazon S3

AWS Machine Learning Training - Using Bucket Policies and User Policies

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

 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