Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 Dumps

To compare a custom scikit-learn model with a benchmark model in a managed environment, the most effective and maintainable solution is to extend an existing SageMaker scikit-learn container.

“If you are using a framework like scikit-learn and need custom logic, you can extend the prebuilt SageMaker containers to include your own inference or training scripts. AWS manages the container base and you only maintain your code.”

This approach allows the data scientist to maintain control over model logic while letting SageMaker handle the container lifecycle, scaling, and infrastructure management—which aligns with the requirement for AWS to handle operational maintenance.

 Regularization and dropouts are techniques that can help reduce overfitting in deep learning models. Overfitting occurs when the model learns too much from the training data and fails to generalize well to new data. Regularization adds a penalty term to the loss function that penalizes the model for having large or complex weights. This prevents the model from memorizing the noise or irrelevant features in the training data. L1 and L2 are two types of regularization that differ in how they calculate the penalty term. L1 regularization uses the absolute value of the weights, while L2 regularization uses the square of the weights. Dropouts are another technique that randomly drops out some units or neurons from the network during training. This creates a thinner network that is less prone to overfitting. Dropouts also act as a form of ensemble learning, where multiple sub-models are combined to produce a better prediction. By applying regularization and dropouts to the training, the web-based company can improve the generalization and accuracy of its deep learning model on the test and validation data. References:

Regularization: A video that explains the concept and benefits of regularization in deep learning.

Dropout: A video that demonstrates how dropout works and why it helps reduce overfitting.

To achieve high availability for Amazon SageMaker endpoints, especially with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 5 minutes, it's essential to deploy the endpoints across multiple Availability Zones (AZs).​

According to the AWS documentation:​

"Create robust endpoints when hosting your model. SageMaker AI endpoints can help protect your application from Availability Zone outages and instance failures. If an outage occurs or an instance fails, SageMaker AI automatically attempts to distribute your instances across Availability Zones. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you deploy multiple instances for each production endpoint."​

Additionally:​

"If you are using an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), configure the VPC with at least two Subnets, each in a different Availability Zone. If an outage occurs or an instance fails, Amazon SageMaker AI automatically attempts to distribute your instances across Availability Zones."​

By configuring the VPC with subnets in multiple AZs and deploying multiple instances of the endpoint, SageMaker can automatically handle failovers in case of an AZ outage, thus meeting the stringent RTO requirement.​

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

Histogram - Wikipedia

Model error - Wikipedia

SageMaker Model Monitor - visualizing monitoring results

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

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

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

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

Create and Manage Workforces - Amazon SageMaker

Use Input and Output Data - Amazon SageMaker

Create a Labeling Job - Amazon SageMaker

Bounding Box Task Type - Amazon SageMaker

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.

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

Serverless inference in SageMaker is designed for workloads with intermittent traffic and unpredictable usage patterns, which aligns with the media company's periodic high-traffic windows. Because the payload is less than 4 MB (serverless inference supports payloads up to 4 MB), serverless inference is appropriate and provisioned concurrency ensures the endpoints are warm and ready during peak times to minimize latency.

From AWS documentation:

“Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference is ideal for applications with intermittent or unpredictable traffic. You can optionally enable provisioned concurrency to ensure that your endpoints are always ready to process requests during anticipated peak traffic hours.”

— AWS SageMaker Serverless Inference documentation

Using real-time inference with auto scaling (A) incurs a higher cost as it requires always-on instances. Batch transform (D) is for offline, large-scale inferences, not low-latency real-time inference. Asynchronous inference (C) is typically used for large payloads (>4 MB) or long processing times.

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

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

1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – Amazon Web Services

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

Amazon SageMaker Studio Data Wrangler is a visual data preparation tool that enables users to clean and normalize data without writing any code. Using Data Wrangler, the data scientist can easily import the time-series data from various sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, or Amazon Redshift. Data Wrangler can automatically generate data insights and quality reports, which can help identify and fix missing values, outliers, and anomalies in the data. Data Wrangler also provides over 250 built-in transformations, such as resampling, interpolation, aggregation, and filtering, which can be applied to the data with a point-and-click interface. Data Wrangler can also export the prepared data to different destinations, such as Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, or Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, for further modeling and analysis. Data Wrangler is integrated with Amazon SageMaker Studio, a web-based IDE for machine learning, which makes it easy to access and use the tool. Data Wrangler is a serverless and fully managed service, which means the data scientist does not need to provision, configure, or manage any infrastructure or clusters.

Option A is incorrect because Amazon EMR Serverless is a serverless option for running big data analytics applications using open-source frameworks, such as Apache Spark. However, using Amazon EMR Serverless would require the data scientist to write PySpark code to perform the data preparation tasks, such as resampling, imputation, and aggregation. This would require more implementation effort than using Data Wrangler, which provides a visual and code-free interface for data preparation.

Option B is incorrect because AWS Glue DataBrew is another visual data preparation tool that can be used to clean and normalize data without writing code. However, DataBrew does not support time-series data as a data type, and does not provide built-in transformations for resampling, interpolation, or aggregation of time-series data. Therefore, using DataBrew would not meet the requirements of the use case.

Option D is incorrect because using Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebook with Pandas would also require the data scientist to write Python code to perform the data preparation tasks. Pandas is a popular Python library for data analysis and manipulation, which supports time-series data and provides various methods for resampling, interpolation, and aggregation. However, using Pandas would require more implementation effort than using Data Wrangler, which provides a visual and code-free interface for data preparation.

1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler documentation

2: Amazon EMR Serverless documentation

3: AWS Glue DataBrew documentation

4: Pandas documentation

The best way to handle the missing values in the patient age feature is to replace them with the mean or median value from the dataset. This is a common technique for imputing missing values that preserves the overall distribution of the data and avoids introducing bias or reducing the sample size. Dropping the records or the feature would result in losing valuable information and reducing the accuracy of the model. Using k-means clustering would not be appropriate for handling missing values in a single feature, as it is a method for grouping similar data points based on multiple features.

Effective Strategies to Handle Missing Values in Data Analysis

How To Handle Missing Values In Machine Learning Data With Weka

How to handle missing values in Python - Machine Learning Plus

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

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

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

A private subnet is a subnet that does not have a route to the internet gateway, which means that the resources in the private subnet cannot access the internet or be accessed from the internet. An S3 VPC endpoint is a gateway endpoint that allows the resources in the VPC to access the S3 service without going through the internet. By launching the notebook instances in a private subnet and accessing the data through an S3 VPC endpoint, the company can set up the job in a secure and compliant way, as the data never leaves the AWS network and is not exposed to the internet. This can also improve the performance and reliability of the data transfer, as the traffic does not depend on the internet bandwidth or availability.

Amazon VPC Endpoints - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Endpoints for Amazon S3 - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker

Working with VPCs and Subnets - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

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

The SageMaker Spark library is a library that enables Apache Spark applications to integrate with Amazon SageMaker for training and hosting machine learning models. The library provides several features, such as:

Estimators: Classes that allow Spark users to train Amazon SageMaker models and host them on Amazon SageMaker endpoints using the Spark MLlib Pipelines API. The library supports various built-in algorithms, such as linear learner, XGBoost, K-means, etc., as well as custom algorithms using Docker containers.

Model classes: Classes that wrap Amazon SageMaker models in a Spark MLlib Model abstraction. This allows Spark users to use Amazon SageMaker endpoints for inference within Spark applications.

Data sources: Classes that allow Spark users to read data from Amazon S3 using the Spark Data Sources API. The library supports various data formats, such as CSV, LibSVM, RecordIO, etc.

To integrate the Spark application with SageMaker, the Machine Learning Specialist should do the following:

Install the SageMaker Spark library in the Spark environment. This can be done by using Maven, pip, or downloading the JAR file from GitHub.

Use the appropriate estimator from the SageMaker Spark Library to train a model. For example, to train a linear learner model, the Specialist can use the following code:

Use the sageMakerModel. transform method to get inferences from the model hosted in SageMaker. For example, to get predictions for a test DataFrame, the Specialist can use the following code:

[SageMaker Spark]: A documentation page that introduces the SageMaker Spark library and its features.

[SageMaker Spark GitHub Repository]: A GitHub repository that contains the source code, examples, and installation instructions for the SageMaker Spark library.

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

 Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe are AWS machine learning services that can analyze and extract metadata from images, text, audio, and video content. These services are easy to use, scalable, and do not require any machine learning expertise. They can help the media company to quickly index its assets and enable rapid identification of relevant content by the research team. Using these services is the fastest route to index the assets, compared to the other options that involve human intervention, custom model development, or additional steps. References:

AWS Media Intelligence Solutions

AWS Machine Learning Services

The Best Services For Running Machine Learning Models On AWS

Data normalization is a data preprocessing technique that scales the features to a common range, such as [0, 1] or [-1, 1]. This helps reduce the impact of features with high magnitude on the cost function and improves the convergence during backpropagation. Data normalization can be done using different methods, such as min-max scaling, z-score standardization, or unit vector normalization. Data normalization is different from dimensionality reduction, which reduces the number of features; model regularization, which adds a penalty term to the cost function to prevent overfitting; and data augmentation, which increases the amount of data by creating synthetic samples. References:

Data processing options for AI/ML | AWS Machine Learning Blog

Data preprocessing - Machine Learning Lens

How to Normalize Data Using scikit-learn in Python

Normalization | Machine Learning | Google for Developers

The best options to use an Inception neural network architecture instead of a ResNet architecture for image classification in Amazon SageMaker are:

Bundle a Docker container with TensorFlow Estimator loaded with an Inception network and use this for model training. This option allows users to customize the training environment and use any TensorFlow model they want. Users can create a Docker image that contains the TensorFlow Estimator API and the Inception model from the TensorFlow Hub, and push it to Amazon ECR. Then, users can use the SageMaker Estimator class to train the model using the custom Docker image and the training data from Amazon S3.

Use custom code in Amazon SageMaker with TensorFlow Estimator to load the model with an Inception network and use this for model training. This option allows users to use the built-in TensorFlow container provided by SageMaker and write custom code to load and train the Inception model. Users can use the TensorFlow Estimator class to specify the custom code and the training data from Amazon S3. The custom code can use the TensorFlow Hub module to load the Inception model and fine-tune it on the training data.

The other options are not feasible for this scenario because:

Customize the built-in image classification algorithm to use Inception and use this for model training. This option is not possible because the built-in image classification algorithm in SageMaker does not support customizing the neural network architecture. The built-in algorithm only supports ResNet models with different depths and widths.

Create a support case with the SageMaker team to change the default image classification algorithm to Inception. This option is not realistic because the SageMaker team does not provide such a service. Users cannot request the SageMaker team to change the default algorithm or add new algorithms to the built-in ones.

Download and apt-get install the inception network code into an Amazon EC2 instance and use this instance as a Jupyter notebook in Amazon SageMaker. This option is not advisable because it does not leverage the benefits of SageMaker, such as managed training and deployment, distributed training, and automatic model tuning. Users would have to manually install and configure the Inception network code and the TensorFlow framework on the EC2 instance, and run the training and inference code on the same instance, which may not be optimal for performance and scalability.

Use Your Own Algorithms or Models with Amazon SageMaker

Use the SageMaker TensorFlow Serving Container

TensorFlow Hub

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

 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

Feature selection is the process of reducing the number of input variables to those that are most relevant for predicting the target variable. One way to do this is to run a correlation check of all features against the target variable and remove features with low target variable correlation scores. This means that these features have little or no linear relationship with the target variable and are not useful for the prediction. This can reduce the model’s complexity and improve its performance. References:

Feature engineering - Machine Learning Lens

Feature Selection For Machine Learning in Python

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 SageMaker managed spot training allows for cost-effective training by utilizing Spot Instances, which are lower-cost EC2 instances that can be interrupted when demand is high. By enabling checkpointing in SageMaker, the company can save intermediate model states to Amazon S3, allowing training to resume from the last checkpoint if interrupted. This solution minimizes operational overhead by automating the checkpointing process and resuming work after interruptions, reducing the need for retraining from scratch.

This setup provides a reliable and cost-efficient approach to training large models with minimal operational overhead and risk of data loss.

 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]

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.

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

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

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

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

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

IP Insights - Amazon SageMaker

Factorization Machines Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Object2Vec Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

 Amazon Forecast requires the input data to be in a specific format. The data scientist should use ETL jobs in AWS Glue to separate the dataset into a target time series dataset and an item metadata dataset. The target time series dataset should contain the timestamp, item_id, and demand columns, while the item metadata dataset should contain the item_id, category, and lead_time columns. Both datasets should be uploaded as .csv files to Amazon S3 . References:

How Amazon Forecast Works - Amazon Forecast

Choosing Datasets - Amazon Forecast

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?

 Amazon EMR is a service that can process large amounts of data efficiently and cost-effectively. It can run distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, which can perform feature engineering on big data. Amazon SageMaker SDK is a Python library that can interact with Amazon SageMaker service to train and deploy machine learning models. It can also use Amazon EMR as a data source for training data. References:

Amazon EMR

Amazon SageMaker SDK

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service that can ingest streaming data and store it in various destinations, including Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can also convert the incoming data to Apache Parquet or Apache ORC format before storing it in Amazon S3. This can reduce the storage cost and improve the performance of analytical queries on the data. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose supports various data sources, such as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, AWS IoT, and custom applications. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can also apply data transformation and compression using AWS Lambda functions.

AWSDMS is not a valid service name. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that can migrate data from various sources to various targets, but it does not support streaming data or Parquet format.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a service that can ingest and process streaming data in real time, but it does not store the data in any destination. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams can be integrated with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to store the data in Parquet format.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that can analyze streaming data using SQL or Apache Flink, but it does not store the data in any destination. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics can be integrated with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to store the data in Parquet format. References:

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose - Amazon Web Services

What Is Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose? - Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose FAQs - Amazon Web Services

The metrics that will indicate an ML solution that will provide the greatest probability of detecting an abnormality are precision and recall. Precision is the ratio of true positives (TP) to the total number of predicted positives (TP + FP), where FP is false positives. Recall is the ratio of true positives (TP) to the total number of actual positives (TP + FN), where FN is false negatives. A high precision means that the ML solution has a low rate of false alarms, while a high recall means that the ML solution has a high rate of true detections. For the chemical company, the goal is to avoid process abnormalities, which are marked as 1 in the labels. Therefore, the company needs an ML solution that has a high recall for the positive class, meaning that it can detect most of the abnormalities and minimize the false negatives. Among the four options, option B has the highest recall for the positive class, which is 0.98. This means that the ML solution can detect 98% of the abnormalities and miss only 2%. Option B also has a reasonable precision for the positive class, which is 0.61. This means that the ML solution has a false alarm rate of 39%, which may be acceptable for the company, depending on the cost and benefit analysis. The other options have lower recall for the positive class, which means that they have higher false negative rates, which can be more detrimental for the company than false positive rates.

1: AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide

2: AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS

3: AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS

4: Precision and recall

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

The best solution for this scenario is to perform forecasting by using claim IDs and dates to identify the expected number of claims in each outcome category every month. This solution has the following advantages:

It leverages the historical data of claim outcomes and dates to capture the temporal patterns and trends of the claims in each category1.

It does not require the claim contents or any other features to make predictions, which simplifies the data preparation and reduces the impact of missing or incomplete data2.

It can handle the high cardinality of the outcome categories, as forecasting models can output multiple values for each time point3.

It can provide predictions for several months in advance, which is useful for planning and budgeting purposes4.

The other solutions have the following drawbacks:

A: Performing classification every month by using supervised learning of the 200 outcome categories based on claim contents is not suitable, because it assumes that the claim contents are available and complete for all the records, which is not the case in this scenario2. Moreover, classification models usually output a single label for each input, which is not adequate for predicting the number of claims in each category3. Additionally, classification models do not account for the temporal aspect of the data, which is important for forecasting1.

B: Performing reinforcement learning by using claim IDs and dates and instructing the insurance agents who submit the claim records to estimate the expected number of claims in each outcome category every month is not feasible, because it requires a feedback loop between the model and the agents, which might not be available or reliable in this scenario5. Furthermore, reinforcement learning is more suitable for sequential decision making problems, where the model learns from its actions and rewards, rather than forecasting problems, where the model learns from historical data and outputs future values6.

D: Performing classification by using supervised learning of the outcome categories for which partial information on claim contents is provided and performing forecasting by using claim IDs and dates for all other outcome categories is not optimal, because it combines two different methods that might not be consistent or compatible with each other7. Also, this solution suffers from the same limitations as solution A, such as the dependency on claim contents, the inability to handle multiple outputs, and the ignorance of temporal patterns123.

1: Time Series Forecasting - Amazon SageMaker

2: Handling Missing Data for Machine Learning | AWS Machine Learning Blog

3: Forecasting vs Classification: What’s the Difference? | DataRobot

4: Amazon Forecast – Time Series Forecasting Made Easy | AWS News Blog

5: Reinforcement Learning - Amazon SageMaker

6: What is Reinforcement Learning? The Complete Guide | Edureka

7: Combining Machine Learning Models | by Will Koehrsen | Towards Data Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature engineering - Machine Learning Lens

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

Feature Selection in Machine Learning | Baeldung on Computer Science

Feature Selection in Machine Learning: An easy Introduction

To prepare the data for Word2Vec, the Specialist needs to perform some preprocessing steps that can help reduce the noise and complexity of the data, as well as improve the quality of the embeddings. Some of the common preprocessing steps for Word2Vec are:

Normalizing all words by making the sentence lowercase: This can help reduce the vocabulary size and treat words with different capitalizations as the same word. For example, “Fox” and “fox” should be considered as the same word, not two different words.

Removing stop words using an English stopword dictionary: Stop words are words that are very common and do not carry much semantic meaning, such as “the”, “a”, “and”, etc. Removing them can help focus on the words that are more relevant and informative for the task.

Tokenizing the sentence into words: Tokenization is the process of splitting a sentence into smaller units, such as words or subwords. This is necessary for Word2Vec, as it operates on the word level and requires a list of words as input.

The other options are not necessary or appropriate for Word2Vec:

Performing part-of-speech tagging and keeping the action verb and the nouns only: Part-of-speech tagging is the process of assigning a grammatical category to each word, such as noun, verb, adjective, etc. This can be useful for some natural language processing tasks, but not for Word2Vec, as it can lose some important information and context by discarding other words.

Correcting the typography on “quck” to “quick”: Typo correction can be helpful for some tasks, but not for Word2Vec, as it can introduce errors and inconsistencies in the data. For example, if the typo is intentional or part of a dialect, correcting it can change the meaning or style of the sentence. Moreover, Word2Vec can learn to handle typos and variations in spelling by learning similar embeddings for them.

One-hot encoding all words in the sentence: One-hot encoding is a way of representing words as vectors of 0s and 1s, where only one element is 1 and the rest are 0. The index of the 1 element corresponds to the word’s position in the vocabulary. For example, if the vocabulary is [“cat”, “dog”, “fox”], then “cat” can be encoded as [1, 0, 0], “dog” as [0, 1, 0], and “fox” as [0, 0, 1]. This can be useful for some machine learning models, but not for Word2Vec, as it does not capture the semantic similarity and relationship between words. Word2Vec aims to learn dense and low-dimensional embeddings for words, where similar words have similar vectors.

Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend are the most efficient combination of services to accomplish the task of sentiment analysis on a video clip with audio in Spanish. Amazon Transcribe is a service that can convert speech to text using deep learning. Amazon Transcribe can transcribe audio from various sources, such as video files, audio files, or streaming audio. Amazon Transcribe can also recognize multiple speakers, different languages, accents, dialects, and custom vocabularies. In this case, Amazon Transcribe can transcribe the audio from the video clip in Spanish to text in Spanish1 Amazon Translate is a service that can translate text from one language to another using neural machine translation. Amazon Translate can translate text from various sources, such as documents, web pages, chat messages, etc. Amazon Translate can also support multiple languages, domains, and styles. In this case, Amazon Translate can translate the text from Spanish to English2 Amazon Comprehend is a service that can analyze and derive insights from text using natural language processing. Amazon Comprehend can perform various tasks, such as sentiment analysis, entity recognition, key phrase extraction, topic modeling, etc. Amazon Comprehend can also support multiple languages and domains. In this case, Amazon Comprehend can perform sentiment analysis on the text in English and determine whether the feedback is positive, negative, neutral, or mixed3

The other options are not valid or efficient for accomplishing the task of sentiment analysis on a video clip with audio in Spanish. Amazon Comprehend, Amazon SageMaker seq2seq, and Amazon SageMaker Neural Topic Model (NTM) are not a good combination, as they do not include a service that can transcribe speech to text, which is a necessary step for processing the audio from the video clip. Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Translate, and Amazon SageMaker BlazingText are not a good combination, as they do not include a service that can perform sentiment analysis, which is the main goal of the task. Amazon SageMaker BlazingText is a service that can train and deploy text classification and word embedding models using deep learning. Amazon SageMaker BlazingText can perform tasks such as text classification, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, etc., but not sentiment analysis4

 AWS KMS is a service that provides encryption and key management for data stored in AWS services and applications. AWS KMS can generate and manage encryption keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt data at rest and in transit. AWS KMS can also integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon SageMaker, to enable encryption of data using the keys stored in AWS KMS. Amazon S3 is a service that provides object storage for data in the cloud. Amazon S3 can use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest using server-side encryption with AWS KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS). Amazon SageMaker is a service that provides a platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker can use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest on the SageMaker instances and volumes, as well as data in transit between SageMaker and other AWS services. AWS Glue is a service that provides a serverless data integration platform for data preparation and transformation. AWS Glue can use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest on the Glue Data Catalog and Glue ETL jobs. AWS Glue can also use built-in or custom classifiers to identify and redact sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, from the customer data1234

The other options are not valid or secure ways to encrypt the data and protect the credit card information. Using a custom encryption algorithm to encrypt the data and store the data on an Amazon SageMaker instance in a VPC is not a good practice, as custom encryption algorithms are not recommended for security and may have flaws or vulnerabilities. Using the SageMaker DeepAR algorithm to randomize the credit card numbers is not a good practice, as DeepAR is a forecasting algorithm that is not designed for data anonymization or encryption. Using an IAM policy to encrypt the data on the Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon Kinesis to automatically discard credit card numbers and insert fake credit card numbers is not a good practice, as IAM policies are not meant for data encryption, but for access control and authorization. Amazon Kinesis is a service that provides real-time data streaming and processing, but it does not have the capability to automatically discard or insert data values. Using an Amazon SageMaker launch configuration to encrypt the data once it is copied to the SageMaker instance in a VPC is not a good practice, as launch configurations are not meant for data encryption, but for specifying the instance type, security group, and user data for the SageMaker instance. Using the SageMaker principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to reduce the length of the credit card numbers is not a good practice, as PCA is a dimensionality reduction algorithm that is not designed for data anonymization or encryption.

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

Using Pipe input mode for Amazon SageMaker algorithms

Using Pipe Mode with Your Own Algorithms

PipeModeDataset Class

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

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.

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

The data scientist should use Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to sort the data into two groups named “enrolled” or “not enrolled.” This will create a labeled dataset that can be used for supervised learning. The data scientist should then use a classification algorithm to run predictions on the test data. A classification algorithm is a suitable choice for predicting a binary outcome, such as enrollment status, based on the input features, such as academic performance. A classification algorithm will output a probability for each class label and assign the most likely label to each observation.

Use Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to Label Data

Classification Algorithm in Machine Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

2: Image Classification Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale. SageMaker provides a variety of tools and frameworks to support the entire machine learning workflow, from data preparation to model deployment.

One of the tools that SageMaker offers is the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK, which is a high-level library that simplifies the interaction with SageMaker APIs and services. The SageMaker Python SDK allows you to write code in Python and use popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, and more. You can use the SageMaker Python SDK to create and manage SageMaker resources such as notebook instances, training jobs, endpoints, and feature store.

If you need to continue working on a TensorFlow project using SageMaker for training without Wi-Fi access, the best approach is to download the TensorFlow Docker container used in SageMaker from GitHub to your local environment, and use the SageMaker Python SDK to test the code. This way, you can ensure that your code is compatible with the SageMaker environment and avoid any potential issues when you upload your code to SageMaker and start the training job. You can also use the same code to deploy your model to a SageMaker endpoint when you have Wi-Fi access again.

To download the TensorFlow Docker container used in SageMaker, you can visit the SageMaker Docker GitHub repository and follow the instructions to build the image locally. You can also use the SageMaker Studio Image Build CLI to automate the process of building and pushing the Docker image to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). To use the SageMaker Python SDK to test the code, you can install the SDK on your local machine by following the installation guide. You can also refer to the TensorFlow documentation for more details on how to use the SageMaker Python SDK with TensorFlow.

SageMaker Docker GitHub repository

SageMaker Studio Image Build CLI

SageMaker Python SDK installation guide

SageMaker Python SDK TensorFlow documentation

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 question is about improving the testing accuracy of a gradient boosting regression model. The testing accuracy is much lower than the training accuracy, which indicates that the model is overfitting the training data. To reduce overfitting, the following steps are recommended:

Use a one-hot encoder for the categorical fields in the dataset. This will create binary features for each category and avoid imposing an ordinal relationship among them. This can help the model learn the patterns better and generalize to unseen data.

Perform standardization on the financial fields in the dataset. This will scale the features to have zero mean and unit variance, which can improve the convergence and performance of the model. This can also help the model handle features with different units and ranges.

Apply L1 regularization to the data. This will add a penalty term to the loss function that is proportional to the absolute value of the coefficients. This can help the model reduce the complexity and select the most relevant features by shrinking the coefficients of less important features to zero.

1: AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

2: AWS Machine Learning Specialty Course

3: AWS Machine Learning Blog

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

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

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

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

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

The following are not required or correct:

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

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

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

Word embeddings are a type of dense representation of words, which encode semantic meaning in a vector form. These embeddings are typically pre-trained on a large corpus of text data, such as a large set of books, news articles, or web pages, and capture the context in which words are used. Word embeddings can be used as features for a nearest neighbor model, which can be used to find words used in similar contexts. Downloading pre-trained word embeddings is a good way to get started quickly and leverage the strengths of these representations, which have been optimized on a large amount of data. This is likely to result in more accurate and reliable features than other options like one-hot encoding, edit distance, or using Amazon Mechanical Turk to produce synonyms.

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

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

Data augmentation is a technique to increase the size and diversity of the training data by applying random transformations such as rotation, translation, scaling, flipping, etc. This can help reduce overfitting and improve the generalization of the model. Data augmentation can be done using the Amazon SageMaker image classification algorithm, which supports various augmentation options such as horizontal_flip, vertical_flip, rotate, brightness, contrast, etc1

The Amazon SageMaker k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm is a supervised learning algorithm that can be used to label unlabeled data based on the similarity to the labeled data. The k-NN algorithm assigns a label to an unlabeled instance by finding the k closest labeled instances in the feature space and taking a majority vote among their labels. This can help increase the size and diversity of the training data and reduce overfitting. The k-NN algorithm can be used with the Amazon SageMaker image classification algorithm by extracting features from the images using a pre-trained model and then applying the k-NN algorithm on the feature vectors2

Using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to label the unlabeled images is not a good option because it is a manual and costly process that requires human annotators. Moreover, it does not address the issue of overfitting on the existing labeled data.

Using image preprocessing to transform the images into grayscale images is not a good option because it reduces the amount of information and variation in the images, which can degrade the performance of the model. Moreover, it does not address the issue of overfitting on the existing labeled data.

Replacing the activation of the last layer with a sigmoid is not a good option because it is not suitable for a multi-class classification problem. A sigmoid activation function outputs a value between 0 and 1, which can be interpreted as a probability of belonging to a single class. However, for a multi-class classification problem, the output should be a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1, which can be achieved by using a softmax activation function.

The best approach to address all of the requirements with the least development effort is to create an AWS Glue job, convert the scripts to PySpark, execute the pipeline, and store the results in Amazon S3. This is because:

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics 1. AWS Glue can run Python and Scala scripts to process data from various sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and more 2. AWS Glue also provides a serverless Apache Spark environment to run ETL jobs, eliminating the need to provision and manage servers 3.

PySpark is the Python API for Apache Spark, a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing 4. PySpark can perform various data transformations and manipulations on structured and unstructured data, such as cleaning, enriching, and compressing 5. PySpark can also leverage the distributed computing power of Spark to handle terabytes of data efficiently and scalably 6.

By creating an AWS Glue job and converting the scripts to PySpark, the company can move the scripts out of Amazon EC2 into a more managed solution that will eliminate the need to maintain servers. The company can also reduce the development effort by using the AWS Glue console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI to create and run the job 7. Moreover, the company can use the AWS Glue Data Catalog to store and manage the metadata of the data sources and targets 8.

The other options are not as suitable as option C for the following reasons:

Option A is not optimal because loading the data into an Amazon Redshift cluster and executing the pipeline by using SQL will incur additional costs and complexity for the company. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse service that enables fast and scalable analysis of structured data . However, it is not designed for ETL purposes, such as cleaning, transforming, enriching, and compressing data. Moreover, using SQL to perform these tasks may not be as expressive and flexible as using Python scripts. Furthermore, the company will have to provision and configure the Amazon Redshift cluster, and load and unload the data from Amazon S3, which will increase the development effort and time.

Option B is not feasible because loading the data into Amazon DynamoDB and converting the scripts to an AWS Lambda function will not work for the company’s use case. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed key-value and document database service that provides fast and consistent performance at any scale . However, it is not suitable for storing and processing terabytes of data daily, as it has limits on the size and throughput of each table and item . Moreover, using AWS Lambda to execute the pipeline will not be efficient or cost-effective, as Lambda has limits on the memory, CPU, and execution time of each function . Therefore, using Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda will not meet the company’s requirements for processing large amounts of data quickly and reliably.

Option D is not relevant because creating a set of individual AWS Lambda functions to execute each of the scripts and building a step function by using the AWS Step Functions Data Science SDK will not address the main issue of moving the scripts out of Amazon EC2. AWS Step Functions is a fully managed service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows . The AWS Step Functions Data Science SDK is an open source library that allows data scientists to easily create workflows that process and publish machine learning models using Amazon SageMaker and AWS Step Functions . However, these services and tools are not designed for ETL purposes, such as cleaning, transforming, enriching, and compressing data. Moreover, as mentioned in option B, using AWS Lambda to execute the scripts will not be efficient or cost-effective for the company’s use case.

What Is AWS Glue?

AWS Glue Components

AWS Glue Serverless Spark ETL

PySpark - Overview

PySpark - RDD

PySpark - SparkContext

Adding Jobs in AWS Glue

Populating the AWS Glue Data Catalog

[What Is Amazon Redshift?]

[What Is Amazon DynamoDB?]

[Service, Account, and Table Quotas in DynamoDB]

[AWS Lambda quotas]

[What Is AWS Step Functions?]

[AWS Step Functions Data Science SDK for Python]

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot is a fully managed solution that automatically explores different ML models and selects the most effective ones for a given prediction task. After model training, Amazon SageMaker Clarify can generate feature importance scores, identifying the top features in a straightforward, automated manner with minimal manual intervention.

By using SageMaker Autopilot, the data scientist can obtain the desired feature importance ranking for predictive attributes with minimal setup and low operational overhead, as opposed to manually configuring models in SageMaker.

 The issue is that the notebook instances’ security group allows inbound traffic from any source IP address, which means that anyone with the authorized URL can access the notebook instances over the internet. To fix this issue, the data science team should modify the security group to allow traffic only from the CIDR ranges of the VPC, which are the IP addresses assigned to the resources within the VPC. This way, only the VPC interface endpoints and the resources within the VPC can communicate with the notebook instances. The data science team should apply this security group to all of the notebook instances’ VPC interfaces, which are the network interfaces that connect the notebook instances to the VPC.

The other options are not correct because:

Option B: Creating an IAM policy that allows the sagemaker:CreatePresignedNotebookInstanceUrl and sagemaker:DescribeNotebookInstance actions from only the VPC endpoints does not prevent individuals outside the VPC from accessing the notebook instances. These actions are used to generate and retrieve the authorized URL for the notebook instances, but they do not control who can use the URL to access the notebook instances. The URL can still be shared or leaked to unauthorized users, who can then access the notebook instances over the internet.

Option C: Adding a NAT gateway to the VPC and converting the subnets where the notebook instances are hosted to private subnets does not solve the issue either. A NAT gateway is used to enable outbound internet access from a private subnet, but it does not affect inbound internet access. The notebook instances can still be accessed over the internet if their security group allows inbound traffic from any source IP address. Moreover, stopping and starting the notebook instances to reassign only private IP addresses is not necessary, because the notebook instances already have private IP addresses assigned by the VPC interface endpoints.

Option D: Changing the network ACL of the subnet the notebook is hosted in to restrict access to anyone outside the VPC is not a good practice, because network ACLs are stateless and apply to the entire subnet. This means that the data science team would have to specify both the inbound and outbound rules for each IP address range that they want to allow or deny. This can be cumbersome and error-prone, especially if the VPC has multiple subnets and resources. It is better to use security groups, which are stateful and apply to individual resources, to control the access to the notebook instances.

Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker

Security Groups for Your VPC - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

VPC Interface Endpoints - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

 The best approach to maximize transcription accuracy during the development phase is to create a custom vocabulary file containing each product name with phonetic pronunciations, and use it with Amazon Transcribe to perform the ASR customization. A custom vocabulary is a list of words and phrases that are likely to appear in your audio input, along with optional information about how to pronounce them. By using a custom vocabulary, you can improve the transcription accuracy of domain-specific terms, such as product names, that may not be recognized by the general vocabulary of Amazon Transcribe. You can also analyze the transcripts and manually update the custom vocabulary file to include updated or additional entries for those names that are not being correctly identified.

The other options are not as effective as option C for the following reasons:

Option A is not suitable because Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces, not for transcribing voicemail messages. Amazon Lex also has a limit of 100 slots per bot, which is not enough to accommodate the 200 unique product names required by the company.

Option B is not optimal because it relies on the word confidence scores in the transcript, which may not be accurate enough to identify all the mis-transcribed product names. Moreover, automatically creating or updating a custom vocabulary file may introduce errors or inconsistencies in the pronunciation or display of the words.

Option D is not feasible because it requires a large amount of training data to build a custom language model. The company only has 4,000 words of Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth voicemail transcripts, which is not enough to train a robust and reliable custom language model. Additionally, creating and updating a custom language model is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, which may not be suitable for the development phase where frequent changes are expected.

Amazon Transcribe – Custom Vocabulary

Amazon Transcribe – Custom Language Models

[Amazon Lex – Limits]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Transfer Service - AWS DataSync

Deploying a DataSync Agent

Creating a Task

Syncing Data with AWS DataSync

The solution that will meet the requirements with the least amount of effort is to use a semantic segmentation algorithm to identify a visitor’s hair in video frames, and pass the identified hair to an ResNet-50 algorithm to determine hair style and hair color. This solution can leverage the existing Amazon SageMaker algorithms and frameworks to perform the tasks of hair segmentation and classification.

Semantic segmentation is a computer vision technique that assigns a class label to every pixel in an image, such that pixels with the same label share certain characteristics. Semantic segmentation can be used to identify and isolate different objects or regions in an image, such as a visitor’s hair in a video frame. Amazon SageMaker provides a built-in semantic segmentation algorithm that can train and deploy models for semantic segmentation tasks. The algorithm supports three state-of-the-art network architectures: Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSP), and DeepLab v3. The algorithm can also use pre-trained or randomly initialized ResNet-50 or ResNet-101 as the backbone network. The algorithm can be trained using P2/P3 type Amazon EC2 instances in single machine configurations1.

ResNet-50 is a convolutional neural network that is 50 layers deep and can classify images into 1000 object categories. ResNet-50 is trained on more than a million images from the ImageNet database and can achieve high accuracy on various image recognition tasks. ResNet-50 can be used to determine hair style and hair color from the segmented hair regions in the video frames. Amazon SageMaker provides a built-in image classification algorithm that can use ResNet-50 as the network architecture. The algorithm can also perform transfer learning by fine-tuning the pre-trained ResNet-50 model with new data. The algorithm can be trained using P2/P3 type Amazon EC2 instances in single or multiple machine configurations2.

The other options are either less effective or more complex to implement. Using an object detection algorithm to identify a visitor’s hair in video frames would not segment the hair at the pixel level, but only draw bounding boxes around the hair regions. This could result in inaccurate or incomplete hair segmentation, especially if the hair is occluded or has irregular shapes. Using an XGBoost algorithm to determine hair style and hair color would require transforming the segmented hair images into numerical features, which could lose some information or introduce noise. XGBoost is also not designed for image classification tasks, and may not achieve high accuracy or performance.

1: Semantic Segmentation Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

2: Image Classification Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

In linear least squares regression, the design matrix (often denoted as XXX) must have full rank to ensure a unique solution. When two or more features are perfectly linearly dependent, it leads to multicollinearity, causing the matrix XTXX^TXXTX to become singular (non-invertible). This singularity prevents the computation of a unique solution for the regression coefficients.​

From the documentation:​

Therefore, perfect linear dependence among features is problematic for linear regression models as it undermines the mathematical foundation required for deriving unique solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1: Amazon SageMaker – Machine Learning Service - AWS

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

3: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) - AWS

4: Amazon Kinesis Video Streams - Amazon Web Services

Amazon Rekognition – Video and Image - AWS

Deploy a Model - Amazon SageMaker

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

Amazon SageMaker Studio

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

SHAP library

To comply with the company’s security requirement that SageMaker notebook instances must not have internet connectivity, the most secure and recommended approach is to use VPC interface endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) for connecting SageMaker to other AWS services such as Amazon S3, without requiring internet access or a NAT Gateway.

Exact Extract from Amazon SageMaker documentation:

“You can connect to your notebook instance from your VPC through an interface endpoint in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instead of connecting over the public internet. When you use a VPC interface endpoint, communication between your VPC and the notebook instance is conducted entirely and securely within the AWS network.”

Further security can be enforced using IAM and security group restrictions:

“To restrict access to only connections made from within your VPC, create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy that restricts access to only calls that come from within your VPC. Then add that policy to every AWS Identity and Access Management user, group, or role used to access the notebook instance.”

Also:

“Use VPC endpoints to keep traffic between your VPC and SageMaker in the AWS network. This is especially useful when your notebook instances or endpoints don’t have internet access.”

By configuring interface VPC endpoints and controlling security groups and IAM policies appropriately, the SageMaker notebook instances can operate without any internet connectivity, meeting the company’s policy securely and effectively.

Residuals are the differences between the actual and predicted values of the target variable in a regression model. A histogram of residuals is a graphical tool that can help evaluate the performance and assumptions of the model. Ideally, the histogram of residuals should have a zero-centered bell shape, which indicates that the residuals are normally distributed with a mean of zero and a constant variance. This means that the model has captured the true relationship between the input and output variables, and that the errors are random and unbiased. However, if the histogram of residuals does not have a zero-centered bell shape, as shown in the image, this means that the model might have prediction errors over a range of target values. This is because the residuals do not form a symmetrical and homogeneous distribution around zero, which implies that the model has some systematic bias or heteroscedasticity. This can affect the accuracy and validity of the model, and indicate that the model needs to be improved or modified.

Residual Analysis in Regression - Statistics By Jim

How to Check Residual Plots for Regression Analysis - dummies

Histogram of Residuals - Statistics How To

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

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

Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines integration

Create a pipeline using a JSON specification

Ingest data into a feature group

The data scientist should obtain a correlated equilibrium policy by formulating this problem as a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. This is because:

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a subfield of reinforcement learning that deals with learning and coordination of multiple agents that interact with each other and the environment 1. MARL can be applied to problems that involve distributed decision making, such as traffic signal control, where each traffic light can be modeled as an agent that observes the traffic state and chooses an action (e.g., changing the signal phase) to optimize a reward function (e.g., minimizing the delay or congestion) 2.

A correlated equilibrium is a solution concept in game theory that generalizes the notion of Nash equilibrium. It is a probability distribution over the joint actions of the agents that satisfies the following condition: no agent can improve its expected payoff by deviating from the distribution, given that it knows the distribution and the actions of the other agents 3. A correlated equilibrium can capture the correlation among the agents’ actions, which is useful for modeling the traffic behavior at each light that is subject to a small stochastic error term.

A correlated equilibrium policy is a policy that induces a correlated equilibrium in a MARL setting. It can be obtained by using various methods, such as policy gradient, actor-critic, or Q-learning algorithms, that can learn from the feedback of the environment and the communication among the agents 4. A correlated equilibrium policy can achieve a better performance than a Nash equilibrium policy, which assumes that the agents act independently and ignore the correlation among their actions 5.

Therefore, by obtaining a correlated equilibrium policy by formulating this problem as a MARL problem, the data scientist can most effectively model the traffic behavior and reduce congestion.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Signal Control: A Survey

Correlated Equilibrium

Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environments

Correlated Q-Learning

 The plot in the graphic shows a right-skewed distribution, which violates the assumption of normality for linear regression. To correct this, the Data Scientist should apply a logarithmic transformation to the feature. This will help to make the distribution more symmetric and closer to a normal distribution, which is a key assumption for linear regression. References:

Linear Regression

Linear Regression with Amazon Machine Learning

Machine Learning on AWS

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

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Certification Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training: Model Evaluation

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

A scatter plot showing the correlation between maximum tree depth and the objective metric is a visualization that can help the Machine Learning Specialist reconfigure the input hyperparameter range(s) for the tree-based ensemble model. A scatter plot is a type of graph that displays the relationship between two variables using dots, where each dot represents one observation. A scatter plot can show the direction, strength, and shape of the correlation between the variables, as well as any outliers or clusters. In this case, the scatter plot can show how the maximum tree depth, which is a hyperparameter that controls the complexity and depth of the decision trees in the ensemble model, affects the AUC, which is the objective metric that measures the performance of the model in terms of the trade-off between true positive rate and false positive rate. By looking at the scatter plot, the Machine Learning Specialist can see if there is a positive, negative, or no correlation between the maximum tree depth and the AUC, and how strong or weak the correlation is. The Machine Learning Specialist can also see if there is an optimal value or range of values for the maximum tree depth that maximizes the AUC, or if there is a point of diminishing returns or overfitting where increasing the maximum tree depth does not improve or even worsens the AUC. Based on the scatter plot, the Machine Learning Specialist can reconfigure the input hyperparameter range(s) for the maximum tree depth to focus on the values that yield the best AUC, and avoid the values that result in poor AUC. This can decrease the amount of time and cost it takes to train the model, as the hyperparameter tuning job can explore fewer and more promising combinations of values. A scatter plot can be created using various tools and libraries, such as Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, etc12

The other options are not valid or relevant for reconfiguring the input hyperparameter range(s) for the tree-based ensemble model. A histogram showing whether the most important input feature is Gaussian is a visualization that can help the Machine Learning Specialist understand the distribution and shape of the input data, but not the hyperparameters. A histogram is a type of graph that displays the frequency or count of values in a single variable using bars, where each bar represents a bin or interval of values. A histogram can show if the variable is symmetric, skewed, or multimodal, and if it follows a normal or Gaussian distribution, which is a bell-shaped curve that is often assumed by many machine learning algorithms. In this case, the histogram can show if the most important input feature, which is a variable that has the most influence or predictive power on the output variable, is Gaussian or not. However, this does not help the Machine Learning Specialist reconfigure the input hyperparameter range(s) for the tree-based ensemble model, as the input feature is not a hyperparameter that can be tuned or optimized. A histogram can be created using various tools and libraries, such as Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, etc34

A scatter plot with points colored by target variable that uses t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) to visualize the large number of input variables in an easier-to-read dimension is a visualization that can help the Machine Learning Specialist understand the structure and clustering of the input data, but not the hyperparameters. t-SNE is a technique that can reduce the dimensionality of high-dimensional data, such as images, text, or gene expression, and project it onto a lower-dimensional space, such as two or three dimensions, while preserving the local similarities and distances between the data points. t-SNE can help visualize and explore the patterns and relationships in the data, such as the clusters, outliers, or separability of the classes. In this case, the scatter plot can show how the input variables, which are the features or predictors of the output variable, are mapped onto a two-dimensional space using t-SNE, and how the points are colored by the target variable, which is the output or response variable that the model tries to predict. However, this does not help the Machine Learning Specialist reconfigure the input hyperparameter range(s) for the tree-based ensemble model, as the input variables and the target variable are not hyperparameters that can be tuned or optimized. A scatter plot with t-SNE can be created using various tools and libraries, such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc5

A scatter plot showing the performance of the objective metric over each training iteration is a visualization that can help the Machine Learning Specialist understand the learning curve and convergence of the model, but not the hyperparameters. A scatter plot is a type of graph that displays the relationship between two variables using dots, where each dot represents one observation. A scatter plot can show the direction, strength, and shape of the correlation between the variables, as well as any outliers or clusters. In this case, the scatter plot can show how the objective metric, which is the performance measure that the model tries to optimize, changes over each training iteration, which is the number of times that the model updates its parameters using a batch of data. A scatter plot can show if the objective metric improves, worsens, or stagnates over time, and if the model converges to a stable value or oscillates or diverges. However, this does not help the Machine Learning Specialist reconfigure the input hyperparameter range(s) for the tree-based ensemble model, as the objective metric and the training iteration are not hyperparameters that can be tuned or optimized. A scatter plot can be created using various tools and libraries, such as Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, etc.

 Transfer learning is a technique that allows us to use a model trained for a certain task as a starting point for a machine learning model for a different task. For image classification, a common practice is to use a pre-trained model that was trained on a large and general dataset, such as ImageNet, and then customize it for the specific task. One way to customize the model is to replace the last fully connected layer, which is responsible for the final classification, with a new layer that has the same number of units as the number of classes in the new task. This way, the model can leverage the features learned by the previous layers, which are generic and useful for many image recognition tasks, and learn to map them to the new classes. The new layer can be initialized with random weights, and the rest of the model can be initialized with the pre-trained weights. This method is also known as feature extraction, as it extracts meaningful features from the pre-trained model and uses them for the new task. References:

Transfer learning and fine-tuning

Deep transfer learning for image classification: a survey

 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 best solution to improve the accuracy of the model and receive notifications for any future performance issues is to perform incremental training to update the model and activate Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to detect model performance issues and to send notifications. Incremental training is a technique that allows you to update an existing model with new data without retraining the entire model from scratch. This can save time and resources, and help the model adapt to changing data patterns. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor is a feature that continuously monitors the quality of machine learning models in production and notifies you when there are deviations in the model quality, such as data drift and anomalies. You can set up alerts that trigger actions, such as sending notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics, when certain conditions are met.

Option B is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Model Governance is a set of tools that help you implement ML responsibly by simplifying access control and enhancing transparency. It does not provide a mechanism to automatically adjust model hyperparameters or improve model accuracy.

Option C is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Debugger is a feature that helps you debug and optimize your model training process by capturing relevant data and providing real-time analysis. However, using Debugger alone does not update the model or monitor its performance in production. Also, retraining the model by using only data from the previous several months may not capture the full range of data variability and may introduce bias or overfitting.

Option D is incorrect because using only data from the previous several months to perform incremental training may not be sufficient to improve the model accuracy, as explained above. Moreover, this option does not specify how to activate Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor or configure the alerts and notifications.

Incremental training

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

Amazon SageMaker Model Governance

Amazon SageMaker Debugger

The best solution to meet the requirements is to apply Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to the training dataset before training. SMOTE is a technique that generates synthetic samples for the minority class by interpolating between existing samples. This can help balance the class distribution and provide more information to the model. SMOTE can improve the performance of the model on the minority class, which is the class of interest in churn prediction. SMOTE can be applied using the SageMaker Data Wrangler, which provides a built-in analysis for oversampling the minority class1.

The other options are not effective solutions for the problem. Applying anomaly detection to remove outliers from the training dataset before training may not improve the model’s accuracy, as outliers may not be the main cause of the false results. Moreover, removing outliers may reduce the diversity of the data and make the model less robust. Applying normalization to the features of the training dataset before training may improve the model’s convergence and stability, but it does not address the class imbalance issue. Normalization can also be applied using the SageMaker Data Wrangler, which provides a built-in transformation for scaling the features2. Applying undersampling to the training dataset before training may reduce the class imbalance, but it also discards potentially useful information from the majority class. Undersampling can also result in underfitting and high bias for the model.

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

Use Docker containers to build models - Amazon SageMaker

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

Amazon Redshift ML enables in-database machine learning model creation and predictions, allowing data scientists to leverage Redshift for model training without needing to export data.

To create and run a model for customer churn prediction in Amazon Redshift ML:

Define the feature variables and target variable: Identify the columns to use as features (predictors) and the target variable (outcome) for the churn prediction model.

Create the model: Write a CREATE MODEL SQL statement, which trains the model using Amazon Redshift’s integration with Amazon SageMaker and stores the model directly in Redshift.

Run predictions: Use the SQL PREDICT function to generate predictions on new data directly within Redshift.

Options B, D, and E are not required as Redshift ML handles model creation and prediction without manual data export to Amazon S3 or additional Spectrum integration.

The model in Experiment 1 had a high variance error because it performed well on the training data (train error = 5%) but poorly on the test data (test error = 8%). This indicates that the model was overfitting the training data and not generalizing well to new data. The model in Experiment 3 had a lower variance error because it performed similarly on the training data (train error = 5.1%) and the test data (test error = 5.4%). This indicates that the model was more robust and less sensitive to the fluctuations in the training data. The model in Experiment 3 achieved this improvement by implementing regularization, which is a technique that reduces the complexity of the model and prevents overfitting by adding a penalty term to the loss function. The model in Experiment 2 had a minimal bias error because it performed similarly on the training data (train error = 5.2%) and the test data (test error = 5.7%) as the model in Experiment 1. This indicates that the model was not underfitting the data and capturing the true relationship between the input and output variables. The model in Experiment 2 increased the number of layers and neurons in the model, which is a way to increase the complexity and flexibility of the model. However, this did not improve the performance of the model, as the variance error remained high. This shows that increasing the complexity of the model is not always the best way to reduce the bias error, and may even increase the variance error if the model becomes too complex for the data. References:

Bias Variance Tradeoff - Clearly Explained - Machine Learning Plus

The Bias-Variance Trade-off in Machine Learning - Stack Abuse

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

1: Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker

When a model shows poor accuracy on both the training and test datasets, it often indicates underfitting. To improve the model’s accuracy, the data scientist can:

Decrease regularization: Excessive regularization can lead to underfitting by constraining the model too much. Reducing it allows the model to capture more complexity.

Increase the number of training examples: Adding more data can help the model learn better and generalize well, especially if the dataset was previously insufficient.

Increase the number of model features: Adding relevant features can help the model capture more predictive information, thus potentially improving accuracy.

Options A, D, and F would either reduce the complexity or impact the generalization capability, which is not desirable in the case of underfitting.

To build a scalable, serverless, and cost-effective data ingestion pipeline, this solution uses a Kinesis data stream to handle fluctuations in data flow, buffering and distributing incoming data in real time. By connecting two Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery streams to the Kinesis data stream, the company can simultaneously route data to Amazon S3 for backup and Amazon OpenSearch Service for analysis.

This approach meets all requirements by providing automatic scaling, reducing operational overhead, and ensuring data storage and analysis without duplicating efforts or needing additional infrastructure.

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 Recordio protobuf format is a binary data format that is optimized for training on SageMaker. It allows faster data loading and lower memory usage compared to other formats such as CSV or numpy arrays. The Recordio protobuf format also supports features such as sparse input, variable-length input, and label embedding. To use the Recordio protobuf format, the data needs to be serialized and deserialized using the appropriate libraries. Some of the built-in algorithms in SageMaker support the Recordio protobuf format as a content type for training and inference. References:

Common Data Formats for Training

Using RecordIO Format

Content Types Supported by Built-in Algorithms

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?)

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.

To count the number of students who are in a class, the solution needs to detect and locate each student in the video frame. Object detection is a computer vision model that can identify and locate multiple objects in an image. To differentiate students who are performing a stretch correctly from students who are performing a stretch incorrectly, the solution needs to measure the location and angle of each student’s arms and legs. Pose estimation is a computer vision model that can estimate the pose of a person by detecting the position and orientation of key body parts. Image classification, OCR, and image GANs are not relevant for this use case. References:

Object Detection: A computer vision technique that identifies and locates objects within an image or video.

Pose Estimation: A computer vision technique that estimates the pose of a person by detecting the position and orientation of key body parts.

Amazon SageMaker: A fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly.

 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

 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

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

To develop a daily ETL workflow containing multiple ETL jobs that can start as soon as data is uploaded to Amazon S3, the best configuration is to use AWS Lambda to trigger an AWS Step Functions workflow to wait for dataset uploads to complete in Amazon S3. Use AWS Glue to join the datasets. Use an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to send an SNS notification to the Administrator in the case of a failure.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can use Lambda to create functions that respond to events such as data uploads to Amazon S3. You can also use Lambda to invoke other AWS services such as AWS Step Functions and AWS Glue.

AWS Step Functions is a service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. You can use Step Functions to create a state machine that defines the sequence and logic of your ETL workflow. You can also use Step Functions to handle errors and retries, and to monitor the execution status of your workflow.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics. You can use Glue to create and run ETL jobs that can join data from multiple sources in Amazon S3. You can also use Glue to catalog your data and make it searchable and queryable.

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors your AWS resources and applications. You can use CloudWatch to create alarms that trigger actions when a metric or a log event meets a specified threshold. You can also use CloudWatch to send notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics, which can then deliver the notifications to subscribers such as email addresses or phone numbers.

Therefore, by using these services together, you can achieve the following benefits:

You can start the ETL workflow as soon as data is uploaded to Amazon S3 by using Lambda functions to trigger Step Functions workflows.

You can wait for all the datasets to be available in Amazon S3 by using Step Functions to poll the S3 buckets and check the data completeness.

You can join the datasets with terabyte-sized datasets in Amazon S3 by using Glue ETL jobs that can scale and parallelize the data processing.

You can store the results of joining datasets in Amazon S3 by using Glue ETL jobs to write the output to S3 buckets.

You can send a notification to the Administrator if one of the jobs fails by using CloudWatch alarms to monitor the Step Functions or Glue metrics and send SNS notifications in case of a failure.

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:

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

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is a tool that helps data scientists and ML developers to prepare data for ML. One of the features of Data Wrangler is the anomaly detection visualization, which uses an unsupervised ML algorithm to identify outliers in the dataset based on statistical properties. The ML specialist can use this feature to quickly explore the sensor data and find any anomalous values that may affect the model performance. The ML specialist can then add a transformation to a Data Wrangler data flow to remove the outliers from the dataset. The data flow can be exported as a script or a pipeline to automate the data preparation process. This option requires the least operational overhead compared to the other options.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Anomaly Detection Visualization - Amazon SageMaker

Transform Data - Amazon SageMaker

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