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

Amazon SageMaker script mode is a feature that allows users to use training scripts similar to those they would use outside SageMaker with SageMaker’s prebuilt containers for various frameworks such as TensorFlow. Script mode supports reading data from Amazon S3 buckets without requiring any changes to the training script. Therefore, option B is the best method of providing training data to Amazon SageMaker that would meet the business requirements with the least development overhead.

Option A is incorrect because using a local path of the data would not be scalable or reliable, as it would depend on the availability and capacity of the local storage. Moreover, using a local path of the data would not leverage the benefits of Amazon S3, such as durability, security, and performance. Option C is incorrect because rewriting the train.py script to convert TFRecords to protobuf would require additional development effort and complexity, as well as introduce potential errors and inconsistencies in the data format. Option D is incorrect because preparing the data in the format accepted by Amazon SageMaker would also require additional development effort and complexity, as well as involve using additional services such as AWS Glue or AWS Lambda, which would increase the cost and maintenance of the solution.

References:

• Bring your own model with Amazon SageMaker script mode
• GitHub - aws-samples/amazon-sagemaker-script-mode
• Deep Dive on TensorFlow training with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon S3
• amazon-sagemaker-script-mode/generate_cifar10_tfrecords.py at master

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 softmax function is a function that can transform a vector of arbitrary real values into a vector of real values in the range (0,1) that sum to 1. This means that the softmax function can produce a valid probability distribution over multiple classes. The softmax function is often used as the activation function of the output layer in a neural network, especially for multi-class classification problems. The softmax function can assign higher probabilities to the classes with higher scores, which allows the network to make predictions based on the most likely class. In this case, the Machine Learning Specialist wants to get an output from the neural network that is a probability distribution of how likely it is that the input image belongs to each of the 10 classes of animals. Therefore, the softmax function is the most suitable function to produce the desired output.

References:

• Softmax Activation Function for Deep Learning: A Complete Guide
• What is Softmax in Machine Learning? - reason.town
• machine learning - Why is the softmax function often used as activation …
• Multi-Class Neural Networks: Softmax | Machine Learning | Google for …

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

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option A: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use Pipe mode instead of File mode will not speed up training or lower costs significantly. Pipe mode is a data ingestion mode that streams data directly from S3 to the training algorithm, without copying the data to the local storage of the training instance. Pipe mode can reduce the startup time of the training job and the disk space usage, but it does not affect the computation time or the instance price. Moreover, Pipe mode may require some code changes to handle the streaming data, depending on the training algorithm2.
• Option B: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use FastFile mode instead of File mode will not speed up training or lower costs significantly. FastFile mode is a data ingestion mode that copies data from S3 to the local storage of the training instance in parallel with the training process. FastFile mode can reduce the startup time of the training job and the disk space usage, but it does not affect the computation time or the instance price. Moreover, FastFile mode is only available for distributed training jobs that use multiple instances, which is not the case for the company3.
• Option D: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use Spot Instances and implementing model checkpoints will not meet the requirements without the need to make any code changes. Model checkpoints are a feature that allows the training job to save the model state periodically to S3, and resume from the latest checkpoint if the training job is interrupted. Model checkpoints can help to avoid losing the training progress and ensure the model convergence, but they require some code changes to implement the checkpointing logic and the resuming logic4.

References:

• 1: Managed Spot Training - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: Pipe Mode - Amazon SageMaker
• 3: FastFile Mode - Amazon SageMaker
• 4: Checkpoints - Amazon SageMaker

• Option A is correct because reducing the number of features with the SageMaker PCA algorithm can help remove noise and redundancy from the data, and improve the model’s performance. PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that transforms the original features into a smaller set of linearly uncorrelated features called principal components. The SageMaker linear learner algorithm supports PCA as a built-in feature transformation option.
• Option E is correct because using the SageMaker k-NN algorithm with a dimension reduction target of less than 1,000 can help the model learn from the similarity of the data points, and improve the model’s performance. k-NN is a non-parametric algorithm that classifies an input based on the majority vote of its k nearest neighbors in the feature space. The SageMaker k-NN algorithm supports dimension reduction as a built-in feature transformation option.
• Option B is incorrect because using the scikit-learn MDS algorithm to reduce the number of features is not a feasible option, as MDS is a computationally expensive technique that does not scale well to large datasets. MDS is a dimensionality reduction technique that tries to preserve the pairwise distances between the original data points in a lower-dimensional space.
• Option C is incorrect because setting the predictor type to regressor would change the model’s objective from classification to regression, which is not suitable for the given problem. A regressor model would output a continuous value instead of a binary label for each phone.
• Option D is incorrect because using the SageMaker k-means algorithm with k of less than 1,000 would not help the model classify the phones, as k-means is a clustering algorithm that groups the data points into k clusters based on their similarity, without using any labels. A clustering model would not output a binary label for each phone.

References:

• Amazon SageMaker Linear Learner Algorithm
• Amazon SageMaker K-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) Algorithm
• [Principal Component Analysis - Scikit-learn]
• [Multidimensional Scaling - Scikit-learn]

A collaborative filtering recommendation engine is a type of machine learning system that can improve sales for a company by using the large amount of information the company has on users’ behavior and product preferences to predict which products users would like based on the users’ similarity to other users. A collaborative filtering recommendation engine works by finding the users who have similar ratings or preferences for the products, and then recommending the products that the similar users have liked but the target user has not seen or rated. A collaborative filtering recommendation engine can leverage the collective wisdom of the users and discover the hidden patterns and associations among the products and the users. A collaborative filtering recommendation engine can be implemented using Apache Spark ML on Amazon EMR, which are two services that can handle large-scale data processing and machine learning tasks. Apache Spark ML is a library that provides various tools and algorithms for machine learning, such as classification, regression, clustering, recommendation, etc. Apache Spark ML can run on Amazon EMR, which is a service that provides a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as Apache Spark, on AWS. Apache Spark ML on Amazon EMR can build a collaborative filtering recommendation engine using the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm, which is a matrix factorization technique that can learn the latent factors that represent the users and the products, and then use them to predict the ratings or preferences of the users for the products. Apache Spark ML on Amazon EMR can also support both explicit feedback, such as ratings or reviews, and implicit feedback, such as views or clicks, for building a collaborative filtering recommendation engine12

The solution that the data scientist should use to improve the performance of the model is to apply the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) on the minority class in the training dataset, and retrain the model with the updated training data. This solution can address the problem of class imbalance in the dataset, which can affect the model’s ability to learn from the rare but important positive class (fraud).

Class imbalance is a common issue in machine learning, especially for classification tasks. It occurs when one class (usually the positive or target class) is significantly underrepresented in the dataset compared to the other class (usually the negative or non-target class). For example, in the credit card fraud detection problem, the positive class (fraud) is much less frequent than the negative class (fair transactions). This can cause the model to be biased towards the majority class, and fail to capture the characteristics and patterns of the minority class. As a result, the model may have a high overall accuracy, but a low recall or true positive rate for the minority class, which means it misses many fraudulent transactions.

SMOTE is a technique that can help mitigate the class imbalance problem by generating synthetic samples for the minority class. SMOTE works by finding the k-nearest neighbors of each minority class instance, and randomly creating new instances along the line segments connecting them. This way, SMOTE can increase the number and diversity of the minority class instances, without duplicating or losing any information. By applying SMOTE on the minority class in the training dataset, the data scientist can balance the classes and improve the model’s performance on the positive class1.

The other options are either ineffective or counterproductive. Applying SMOTE on the majority class would not balance the classes, but increase the imbalance and the size of the dataset. Undersampling the minority class would reduce the number of instances available for the model to learn from, and potentially lose some important information. Oversampling the majority class would also increase the imbalance and the size of the dataset, and introduce redundancy and overfitting.

References:

• 1: SMOTE for Imbalanced Classification with Python - Machine Learning Mastery

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

• Choose a lower number of layers: Reducing the number of layers can reduce the complexity and capacity of the neural network model, making it less prone to overfitting. A model with 50 hidden layers is likely too deep for the given data size and task. A simpler model with fewer layers can learn the essential features of the data without memorizing the noise.
• Enable dropout: Dropout is a regularization technique that randomly drops out some units in the neural network during training. This prevents the units from co-adapting too much and forces the model to learn more robust features. Dropout can improve the generalization and test performance of the model by reducing overfitting.
• Enable early stopping: Early stopping is another regularization technique that monitors the validation error during training and stops the training process when the validation error stops decreasing or starts increasing. This prevents the model from overtraining on the training data and reduces overfitting.

References:

• Deep Learning - Machine Learning Lens
• How to Avoid Overfitting in Deep Learning Neural Networks
• How to Identify Overfitting Machine Learning Models in Scikit-Learn

 Residual plots are a model evaluation technique that can be used to understand whether a regression model is more frequently overestimating or underestimating the target. Residual plots are graphs that plot the residuals (the difference between the actual and predicted values) against the predicted values or other variables. Residual plots can help the Machine Learning Specialist to identify the patterns and trends in the residuals, such as the direction, shape, and distribution. Residual plots can also reveal the presence of outliers, heteroscedasticity, non-linearity, or other problems in the model12

To determine whether the model is overestimating or underestimating the target, the Machine Learning Specialist can use a residual plot that plots the residuals against the predicted values. This type of residual plot is also known as a prediction error plot. A prediction error plot can show the magnitude and direction of the errors made by the model. If the model is overestimating the target, the residuals will be negative, and the points will be below the zero line. If the model is underestimating the target, the residuals will be positive, and the points will be above the zero line. If the model is accurate, the residuals will be close to zero, and the points will be scattered around the zero line. A prediction error plot can also show the variance and bias of the model. If the model has high variance, the residuals will have a large spread, and the points will be far from the zero line. If the model has high bias, the residuals will have a systematic pattern, such as a curve or a slope, and the points will not be randomly distributed around the zero line. A prediction error plot can help the Machine Learning Specialist to optimize the model by adjusting the complexity, features, or parameters of the model34

The other options are not valid or suitable for determining whether the model is overestimating or underestimating the target. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is a model evaluation metric that measures the average magnitude of the errors made by the model. RMSE is the square root of the mean of the squared residuals. RMSE can indicate the overall accuracy and performance of the model, but it cannot show the direction or distribution of the errors. RMSE can also be influenced by outliers or extreme values, and it may not be comparable across different models or datasets5 Area under the curve (AUC) is a model evaluation metric that measures the ability of the model to distinguish between the positive and negative classes. AUC is the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which plots the true positive rate against the false positive rate for various classification thresholds. AUC can indicate the overall quality and performance of the model, but it is only applicable for binary classification models, not regression models. AUC cannot show the magnitude or direction of the errors made by the model. Confusion matrix is a model evaluation technique that summarizes the number of correct and incorrect predictions made by the model for each class. A confusion matrix is a table that shows the counts of true positives, false positives, true negatives, and false negatives for each class. A confusion matrix can indicate the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of the model for each class, but it is only applicable for classification models, not regression models. A confusion matrix cannot show the magnitude or direction of the errors made by the model.

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

• 1: Amazon Rekognition documentation
• 2: Amazon A2I documentation
• 3: Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels documentation
• 4: Amazon A2I Private Workforce documentation

Normalization is a data preprocessing technique that can be used to scale the input features to a common range, such as [-1, 1] or [0, 1]. Normalization can help reduce the effect of outliers, improve the convergence of gradient-based algorithms, and prevent variables with a larger magnitude from dominating the model. One common method of normalization is standardization, which transforms each feature to have a mean of 0 and a variance of 1. This can be done by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation of each feature. Standardization can be useful for models that assume the input features are normally distributed, such as linear regression, logistic regression, and support vector machines. References:

• Data normalization and standardization: A video that explains the concept and benefits of data normalization and standardization.
• Standardize or Normalize?: A blog post that compares different methods of scaling the input features.

 To improve the training speed of a time-series forecasting model using TensorFlow, the Machine Learning Specialist should change the TensorFlow code to implement a Horovod distributed framework supported by Amazon SageMaker. Horovod is a free and open-source software framework for distributed deep learning training using TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and Apache MXNet1. Horovod can scale up to hundreds ofGPUs with upwards of 90% scaling efficiency2. Horovod is easy to use, as it requires only a few lines of Python code to modify an existing training script2. Horovod is also portable, as it runs the same for TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and MXNet; on premise, in the cloud, and on Apache Spark2.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly3. Amazon SageMaker supports Horovod as a built-in distributed training framework, which means that the Machine Learning Specialist does not need to install or configure Horovod separately4. Amazon SageMaker also provides a number of features and tools to simplify and optimize the distributed training process, such as automatic scaling, debugging, profiling, and monitoring4. By using Amazon SageMaker, the Machine Learning Specialist can parallelize the training to as many machines as needed to achieve the business goals, while minimizing coding effort and infrastructure changes.

References:

• 1: Horovod (machine learning) - Wikipedia
• 2: Home - Horovod
• 3: Amazon SageMaker – Machine Learning Service – AWS
• 4: Use Horovod with Amazon SageMaker - 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

The best indicators that an ML-based solution is suitable for this scenario are D and E, because they imply that the historical sensor data is sufficient and relevant for building a predictive maintenance model. This model can use machine learning techniques such as regression, classification, or anomaly detection to learn from the past data and forecast future failures or issues12. Having high granularity and diversity of data can improve the accuracy andgeneralization of the model, as well as enable the detection of complex patterns and relationships that are not captured by simple rule-based thresholds3.

The other options are not good indicators that an ML-based solution is suitable, because they suggest that the historical sensor data is incomplete, inconsistent, or inadequate for building a predictive maintenance model. These options would require additional data collection, preprocessing, or augmentation to overcome the data quality issues and ensure that the model can handle different scenarios and types of cranes4 .

References:

• 1: Machine Learning Techniques for Predictive Maintenance
• 2: A Guide to Predictive Maintenance & Machine Learning
• 3: Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance: Reinventing Asset Upkeep
• 4: Predictive Maintenance with Machine Learning: A Complete Guide
• : [Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance - AWS Online Tech Talks]

The problem of detecting whether or not individuals in a collection of images are wearing the company’s retail brand is an example of image recognition, which is a type of machine learning task that identifies and classifies objects in an image. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a type of machine learning algorithm that are well-suited for image recognition, as they can learn to extract features from images and handle variations in size, shape, color, and orientation of the objects. CNNs consist of multiple layers that perform convolution, pooling, and activation operations on the input images, resulting in a high-level representation that can be used for classification or detection. Therefore, option D is the best choice for the machine learning algorithm that meets the requirements of the chief editor.

Option A is incorrect because latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a type of machine learning algorithm that is used for topic modeling, which is a task that discovers the hidden themes or topics in a collection of text documents. LDA is not suitable for image recognition, as it does not preserve the spatial information of the pixels. Option B is incorrect because recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a type of machine learning algorithm that are used for sequential data, such as text, speech, or time series. RNNs can learn from the temporal dependencies and patterns in the input data, and generate outputs that depend on the previous states. RNNs are not suitable for image recognition, as they do not capture the spatial dependencies and patterns in the input images. Option C is incorrect because k-means is a type of machine learning algorithm that is used for clustering, which is a task that groups similar data points together based on their features. K-means is not suitable for image recognition, as it does not perform classification or detection of the objects in the images.

References:

• Image Recognition Software - ML Image & Video Analysis - Amazon …
• Image classification and object detection using Amazon Rekognition …
• AWS Amazon Rekognition - Deep Learning Face and Image Recognition …
• GitHub - awslabs/aws-ai-solution-kit: Machine Learning APIs for common …
• Meet iNaturalist, an AWS-powered nature app that helps you identify …

• B. Apply principal component analysis (PCA): PCA is a technique that reduces the dimensionality of a dataset by transforming the original features into a smaller set of new features that capture most of the variance in the data. PCA can help address the issue of multicollinearity, which occurs when some features are highly correlated with each other and can cause problems for some machine learning algorithms. By applying PCA, the data engineer can reduce the number of features and remove the redundancy in the data.
• C. Remove a portion of highly correlated features from the dataset: Another way to deal with multicollinearity is to manually remove some of the features that are highly correlated with each other. This can help simplify the model and avoid overfitting. The data engineer can use the correlation matrix to identify the features that have a high correlation coefficient (e.g., above 0.8 or below -0.8) and remove one of them from the dataset. References: =
• Principal Component Analysis: This is a document from AWS that explains what PCA is, how it works, and how to use it with Amazon SageMaker.
• Multicollinearity: This is a document from AWS that describes what multicollinearity is, how to detect it, and how to deal with it.

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

• Data Transformation - Amazon SageMaker
• Transforming Skewed Data for Machine Learning

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

• The XGBoost algorithm is a popular machine learning technique for classification problems. It is based on the idea of boosting, which is to combine many weak learners (decision trees) into a strong learner (ensemble model).
• The XGBoost algorithm can handle imbalanced data by using the scale_pos_weight parameter, which controls the balance of positive and negative weights in the objective function. A typical value to consider is the ratio of negative cases to positive cases in the data. By increasing this parameter, the algorithm will pay more attention to the minority class (positive) and reduce the number of false negatives.
• The XGBoost algorithm can also use different evaluation metrics to optimize the model performance. The default metric is error, which is the misclassification rate. However, this metric can be misleading for imbalanced data, as it does not account for the different costs of false positives and false negatives. A better metric to use is AUC, which is the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The ROC curve plots the true positive rate against the false positive rate for different threshold values. The AUC measures how well the model can distinguish between the two classes, regardless of the threshold. By changing the eval_metric parameter to AUC, the algorithm will try to maximize the AUC score and reduce the number of false negatives.
• Therefore, the combination of steps that should be taken to reduce the number of false negatives are to increase the scale_pos_weight parameter and change the eval_metric parameter to AUC.

References:

• XGBoost Parameters
• XGBoost for Imbalanced Classification

Amazon SageMaker supports encryption at rest for the ML storage volumes, the model artifacts, and the data in Amazon S3 using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). AWS KMS is a service that allows customers to create and manage encryption keys that can be used to encrypt data. AWS KMS also provides an audit trail of key usage by logging key events to AWS CloudTrail. Customers can use either AWS managed keys or customer managed keys to encrypt their data. AWS managed keys are created and managed by AWS on behalf of the customer, while customer managed keys are created and managed by the customer. Customer managed keys offer more control and flexibility over the key policies, permissions, and rotation. Therefore, to meet the requirements of the company, the best option is to use customer managed keys in AWS KMS to encrypt the ML data volumes, and to encrypt the model artifacts and data in Amazon S3.

The other options are not correct because:

• Option A: AWS Cloud HSM is a service that provides hardware security modules (HSMs) to store and use encryption keys. AWS Cloud HSM is not integrated with Amazon SageMaker, and cannotbe used to encrypt the ML data volumes, the model artifacts, or the data in Amazon S3. AWS Cloud HSM is more suitable for customers who need to meet strict compliance requirements or who need direct control over the HSMs.
• Option B: SageMaker built-in transient keys are temporary keys that are used to encrypt the ML data volumes and are discarded immediately after encryption. These keys do not provide persistent encryption or logging of key usage. Enabling default encryption for new Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes does not affect the ML data volumes, which are encrypted separately by SageMaker. Moreover, this option does not address the encryption of the model artifacts and data in Amazon S3.
• Option D: AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is a service that provides temporary credentials to access AWS resources. AWS STS does not provide encryption keys or encryption services. AWS STS cannot be used to encrypt the ML storage volumes, the model artifacts, or the data in Amazon S3.

References:

• Protect Data at Rest Using Encryption - Amazon SageMaker
• What is AWS Key Management Service? - AWS Key Management Service
• What is AWS CloudHSM? - AWS CloudHSM
• What is AWS Security Token Service? - AWS Security Token Service

SageMaker Data Wrangler is a feature of SageMaker Studio that provides an end-to-end solution for importing, preparing, transforming, featurizing, and analyzing data. Data Wrangler includes built-in analyses that help generate visualizations and data insights in a few clicks. One of the built-in analyses is the Quick Model visualization, which can be used to quickly evaluate the data and produce importance scores for each feature. A feature importance score indicates how useful a feature is at predicting a target label. The feature importance score is between [0, 1] and a higher number indicates that the feature is more important to the whole dataset. The Quick Model visualization uses a random forest model to calculate the feature importance for each feature using the Gini importance method. This method measures the total reduction in node impurity (a measure of how well a node separates the classes) that is attributed to splitting on a particular feature. The ML developer can use the Quick Model visualization to obtain the importance scores for each feature of the dataset and use them to feature engineer the dataset. This solution requires the least development effort compared to the other options.

References:

•Analyze and Visualize

•Detect multicollinearity, target leakage, and feature correlation with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler

 The issue described in the question is a sign of overfitting, which is a common problem in machine learning when the model learns the noise and details of the training data too well and fails to generalize to new and unseen data. Overfitting can result in a low training error rate but a high test error rate, which indicates poor performance and validity of the model. There are several techniques that can be used to prevent or reduce overfitting, such as data augmentation and regularization.

Data augmentation is a technique that applies various transformations to the original training data, such as rotation, scaling, cropping, flipping, adding noise, changing brightness, etc., to create new and diverse data samples. Data augmentation can increase the size and diversity of the training data, which can help the model learn more features and patterns and reduce the variance of the model. Data augmentation is especially useful for image data, as it can simulate different scenarios and perspectives that the model may encounter in real life. For example, in the question, the device uses a camera to observe drivers’ behavior, so data augmentation can help the model deal with different lighting conditions, angles, distances, etc. Data augmentation can be done using various libraries and frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, OpenCV, etc12

Regularization is a technique that adds a penalty term to the model’s objective function, which is typically based on the model’s parameters. Regularization can reduce the complexity and flexibility of the model, which can prevent overfitting by avoiding learning the noise and details of the training data. Regularization can also improve the stability and robustness of the model, as it can reduce the sensitivity of the model to small fluctuations in the data. There are different types of regularization, such as L1, L2, dropout, etc., but they all have the same goal of reducing overfitting. L2 regularization, also known as weight decay or ridge regression, is one of the most common and effective regularization techniques. L2 regularization adds the squared norm of the model’s parameters multiplied by a regularization parameter (lambda) to the model’s objective function. L2 regularization can shrink the model’s parameters towards zero, which can reduce thevariance of the model and improve the generalization ability of the model. L2 regularization can be implemented using various libraries and frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, Scikit-learn, etc34

The other options are not valid or relevant for resolving the issue of overfitting. Adding vanishing gradient to the model is not a technique, but a problem that occurs when the gradient of the model’s objective function becomes very small and the model stops learning. Making the neural network architecture complex is not a solution, but a possible cause of overfitting, as a complex model can have more parameters and more flexibility to fit the training data too well. Using gradient checking in the model is not a technique, but a debugging method that verifies the correctness of the gradient computation in the model. Gradient checking is not related to overfitting, but to the implementation of the model.

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.

References:

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

• Deploy all the models to a single SageMaker endpoint. Amazon SageMaker is a service that can build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker can deploy multiple models to a single endpoint, which is a web service that can serve predictions from the models. Each model can be treated as a production variant, which is a version of the model that runs on one or more instances. Amazon SageMaker can distribute the traffic among the production variants according to the specified weights1.
• Treat each model as a production variant. Amazon SageMaker can deploy multiple models to a single endpoint, which is a web service that can serve predictions from the models. Each model can be treated as a production variant, which is a version of the model that runs on one or more instances. Amazon SageMaker can distribute the traffic among the production variants according to the specified weights1.
• Configure an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created. Amazon S3 is a service that can store and retrieve any amount of data. Amazon S3 can send event notifications when certain actions occur on the objects in a bucket, such as object creation, deletion, or modification. Amazon S3 can invoke an AWS Lambda function as a destination forthe event notifications. AWS Lambda is a service that can run code without provisioning or managing servers2.
• Configure the Lambda function to call each production variant and return the results of each model. AWS Lambda can execute the code that can call the SageMaker endpoint and specify the production variant to invoke. AWS Lambda can use the AWS SDK or the SageMaker Runtime API to send requests to the endpoint and receive the predictions from the models. AWS Lambda can return the results of each model as a response to the event notification3.

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option A: Configuring an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created, configuring the Lambda function to create three SageMaker batch transform jobs, one batch transform job for each model for each document, will incur more operational overhead than using a single SageMaker endpoint. Amazon SageMaker batch transform is a service that can process large datasets in batches and store the predictions in Amazon S3. Amazon SageMaker batch transform is not suitable for real-time inference, as it introduces a delay between the request and the response. Moreover, creating three batch transform jobs for each document will increase the complexity and cost of the solution4.
• Option C: Deploying each model to its own SageMaker endpoint, configuring an S3 event notification that invokes an AWS Lambda function when new documents are created, configuring the Lambda function to call each endpoint and return the results of each model, will incur more operational overhead than using a single SageMaker endpoint. Deploying each model to its own endpoint will increase the number of resources and endpoints to manage and monitor. Moreover, calling each endpoint separately will increase the latency and network traffic of the solution5.
• Option D: Deploying each model to its own SageMaker endpoint, creating three AWS Lambda functions, configuring each Lambda function to call a different endpoint and return the results, configuring three S3 event notifications to invoke the Lambda functions when new documents are created, will incur more operational overhead than using a single SageMaker endpoint and a single Lambda function. Deploying each model to its own endpoint will increase the number of resources and endpoints to manage and monitor. Creating three Lambda functions will increase the complexity and cost of the solution. Configuring three S3 event notifications will increase the number of triggers and destinations to manage and monitor6.

References:

• 1: Deploying Multiple Models to a Single Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: Configuring Amazon S3 Event Notifications - Amazon Simple Storage Service
• 3: Invoke an Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker
• 4: Get Inferences for an Entire Dataset with Batch Transform - Amazon SageMaker
• 5: Deploy a Model - Amazon SageMaker
• 6: AWS Lambda

 The 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.

References:

• 1: AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• 2: AWS Machine Learning Specialty Course
• 3: AWS Machine Learning Blog

• To capture word context and sequential QA information, the embedding vectors need to consider both the order and the meaning of the words in the text.
• Option B, Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Skip-gram mode, is a valid option because it can learn word embeddings that capture the semantic similarity and syntactic relations between words based on their co-occurrence in a window of words. Skip-gram mode can also handle rare words better than continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) mode1.
• Option E, combination of the Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Batch Skip-gram mode with a custom recurrent neural network (RNN), is another valid option because it can leverage the advantages of Skip-gram mode and also use an RNN to model the sequential nature of the text. AnRNN can capture the temporal dependencies and long-term dependencies between words, which are important for QA tasks2.
• Option A, Amazon SageMaker seq2seq algorithm, is not a valid option because it is designed for sequence-to-sequence tasks such as machine translation, summarization, or chatbots. It does not produce embedding vectors for text series, but rather generates an output sequence given an input sequence3.
• Option C, Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec algorithm, is not a valid option because it is designed for learning embeddings for pairs of objects, such as text-image, text-text, or image-image. It does notproduce embedding vectors for text series, but rather learns a similarity function between pairs of objects4.
• Option D, Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) mode, is not a valid option because it does not capture word context as well as Skip-gram mode. CBOW mode predicts a word given its surrounding words, while Skip-gram mode predicts the surrounding words given a word. CBOW mode is faster and more suitable for frequent words, but Skip-gram mode can learn more meaningful embeddings for rare words1.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker BlazingText
• 2: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)
• 3: Amazon SageMaker Seq2Seq
• 4: Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec

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

References:

• Clustering - Amazon SageMaker
• Dimensionality Reduction - Amazon SageMaker

The data scientist should remove the stop words from the blog post data by using the Count Vectorizer function in the scikit-learn library, and replace the blog post data in the S3 bucket with the results of the vectorizer. This is because:

• The Count Vectorizer function is a tool that can convert a collection of text documents to a matrix of token counts 1. It also enables the pre-processing of text data prior to generating the vector representation, such as removing accents, converting to lowercase, and filtering out stop words 1. By using this function, the data scientist can remove the stop words such as “a,” “an,” and “the” from the blog post data, and obtain a numerical representation of the text that can be used as input for the NTM algorithm.
• The NTM algorithm is a neural network-based topic modeling technique that can learn latent topics from a corpus of documents 2. It can be used to recommend tags from blog posts by finding the most probable topics for each document, and ranking the words associated with each topic 3. However, the NTM algorithm does not perform any text pre-processing by itself, so it relies on the quality of the input data. Therefore, the data scientist should replace the blog post data in the S3 bucket with the results of the vectorizer, to ensure that the NTM algorithm does not include the stop words in the tag recommendations.
• The other options are not suitable for the following reasons:

References:

• Neural Topic Model (NTM) Algorithm
• Introduction to the Amazon SageMaker Neural Topic Model
• Amazon Comprehend - Entity Recognition
• sklearn.feature_extraction.text.CountVectorizer
• Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Algorithm
• Object Detection Algorithm

A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a type of neural network that can process sequential data, such as time series, by maintaining a hidden state that captures the temporal dependencies between the inputs. RNNs are well suited for predicting future events based on past observations, such as forecasting engine failures based on sensor readings. To train an RNN model, the data needs to be labeled with the target variable, which in this case is the type and time of the engine fault. This makes the problem a supervised learning problem, where the goal is to learn a mapping from the input sequence (sensor readings) to the output sequence (engine faults). By using an RNN model, the manufacturer can leverage the temporal information in the data and detect patterns that indicate when an engine might need maintenance for a certain fault.

References:

• Recurrent Neural Networks - Amazon SageMaker
• Use Amazon SageMaker Built-in Algorithms or Pre-trained Models
• Recurrent Neural Network Definition | DeepAI
• What are Recurrent Neural Networks? An Ultimate Guide for Newbies!
• Lee and Carter go Machine Learning: Recurrent Neural Networks - SSRN

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.

References:

• Load testing your auto scaling configuration - Amazon SageMaker
• Configure model auto scaling with the console - Amazon SageMaker

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

• C. Generate more positive samples by duplicating the positive samples and adding a small amount of noise to the duplicated data. This is a technique called data augmentation, which can help increase the size and diversity of the training data for the minority class. This can help the random forest model learn more features and patterns from the positive class and reduce the imbalance ratio.
• D. Change the cost function so that false negatives have a higher impact on the cost value than false positives. This is a technique called cost-sensitive learning, which can assign different weights or costs to different classes or errors. By assigning a higher cost to false negatives (predicting non-paid when the user is actually paid), the random forest model can be more sensitive to the minority class and try to minimize the misclassification of the positive class.

References:

• Bagging and Random Forest for Imbalanced Classification
• Surviving in a Random Forest with Imbalanced Datasets
• machine learning - random forest for imbalanced data? - Cross Validated
• Biased Random Forest For Dealing With the Class Imbalance Problem

The best solution for this scenario is to use shadow deployment, which is a technique that allows the company to run the new experimental model in parallel with the existing model, without exposing it to the end users. In shadow deployment, the company can route the same user requests to both models, but only return the responses from the existing model to the users. The responses from the new experimental model are logged and analyzed for quality and performance metrics, such as accuracy, latency, and resource consumption12. This way, the company can validate the new experimental model in a production environment, without affecting the current live traffic or user experience.

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

• A: A/B testing is a technique that involves splitting the user traffic between two or more models, and comparing their outcomes based on predefined metrics. However, this technique exposes the new experimental model to a portion of the end users, which might affect their experience if the model is not reliable or consistent with the existing model3.
• B: Canary release is a technique that involves gradually rolling out the new experimental model to a small subset of users, and monitoring its performance and feedback. However, this technique also exposes the new experimental model to some end users, and requires careful selection and segmentation of the user groups4.
• D: Blue/green deployment is a technique that involves switching the user traffic from the existing model (blue) to the new experimental model (green) at once, after testing and verifying the new model in a separate environment. However, this technique does not allow the company to validate the new experimental model in a production environment, and might cause service disruption or inconsistency if the new model is not compatible or stable5.

References:

• 1: Shadow Deployment: A Safe Way to Test in Production | LaunchDarkly Blog
• 2: Shadow Deployment: A Safe Way to Test in Production | LaunchDarkly Blog
• 3: A/B Testing for Machine Learning Models | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• 4: Canary Releases for Machine Learning Models | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• 5: Blue-Green Deployments for Machine Learning Models | AWS Machine Learning Blog

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.

References:

• Use Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to Label Data
• Classification Algorithm in Machine Learning

 The TensorFlow estimator configuration that will train the model most cost-effectively is to turn on SageMaker Training Compiler by adding compiler_config=TrainingCompilerConfig() as a parameter, turn on managed spot training by setting the use_spot_instances parameter to True, and pass the script to the estimator in the call to the TensorFlow fit() method. This configuration will optimize the model for the target hardware platform, reduce the training cost by using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, and use the custom Python script without any modification.

SageMaker Training Compiler is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to optimize your TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet models for inference on a variety of target hardware platforms. SageMaker Training Compiler can improve the inference performance and reduce the inference cost of your models by applying various compilation techniques, such as operator fusion, quantization, pruning, and graph optimization. You can enable SageMaker Training Compiler by adding compiler_config=TrainingCompilerConfig() as a parameter to the TensorFlow estimator constructor1.

Managed spot training is another feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for training your machine learning models. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various fault-tolerant and flexible applications. You can enable managed spot training by setting the use_spot_instances parameter to True and specifying the max_wait and max_run parameters in the TensorFlow estimator constructor2.

The TensorFlow estimator is a class in the SageMaker Python SDK that allows you to train and deploy TensorFlow models on SageMaker. You can use the TensorFlow estimator to run your own Python script on SageMaker, without any modification. You can pass the script to the estimator in the call to the TensorFlow fit() method, along with the location of your input data. The fit() method starts a SageMaker training job and runs your script as the entry point in the training containers3.

The other options are either less cost-effective or more complex to implement. Adjusting the training script to use distributed data parallelism would require modifying the script and specifying appropriate values for the distribution parameter, which could increase the development time and complexity. Setting the MaxWaitTimeInSeconds parameter to be equal to the MaxRuntimeInSeconds parameter would not reduce the cost, as it would only specify the maximum duration of the training job, regardless of the instance type.

References:

• 1: Optimize TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet models for deployment using Amazon SageMaker Training Compiler | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• 2: Managed Spot Training: Save Up to 90% On Your Amazon SageMaker Training Jobs | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• 3: sagemaker.tensorflow — sagemaker 2.66.0 documentation

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

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option B: Training a Bidirectional Attention Flow (BiDAF) network based on past customer questions and company documents, deploying the model as a real-time Amazon SageMaker endpoint, and integrating the model with the chatbot by using the SageMaker Runtime InvokeEndpoint API operation will incur more development effort than using Amazon Kendra. The company will have to write the code for the BiDAF network, which is a complex deep learning model for question answering. The company will also have to manage the SageMaker endpoint, the model artifact, and the inference logic2.
• Option C: Training an Amazon SageMaker BlazingText model based on past customer questions and company documents, deploying the model as a real-time SageMaker endpoint, and integrating the model with the chatbot by using the SageMaker Runtime InvokeEndpoint API operation will incur more development effort than using Amazon Kendra. The company will have to write the code for the BlazingText model, which is a fast and scalable text classification and word embedding algorithm. The company will also have to manage the SageMaker endpoint, the model artifact, and the inference logic3.
• Option D: Indexing company documents by using Amazon OpenSearch Service and integrating the chatbot with OpenSearch Service by using the OpenSearch Service k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) Query API operation will not meet the requirements effectively. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed service that provides fast and scalable search and analytics capabilities. However, it is not designed for natural language question answering, and it may not provide accurate or relevant answers for the chatbot. Moreover, the k-NN Query API operation is used to find the most similar documents or vectors based on a distance function, not to find the best answers based on a natural language query4.

References:

• 1: Amazon Kendra
• 2: Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension
• 3: Amazon SageMaker BlazingText
• 4: Amazon OpenSearch Service

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

• Enable server-side encryption on the S3 bucket. This will encrypt the images stored in the bucket using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master keys (CMKs). This will protect the data at rest from unauthorized access1
• Submit an AWS Support ticket to opt out of allowing images to be used for improving the service, and follow the process provided by AWS Support. This will prevent AWS from storing or using the images processed by Amazon Rekognition for service development or enhancement purposes. This will protect the data privacy and ownership2
• Use HTTPS to call the Amazon Rekognition CompareFaces API operation. This will encrypt the data in transit between the client and the server using SSL/TLS protocols. This will protect the data from interception or tampering3

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

• Option B switches to using an Amazon Rekognition collection to store the images. A collection is a container for storing face vectors that are calculated by Amazon Rekognition. It does not encrypt the images at rest or in transit, and it does not opt out of data usage for service improvement. It also requires changing the API operations from CompareFaces to IndexFaces and SearchFacesByImage, which may not have the same functionality or performance4
• Option C switches to using the AWS GovCloud (US) Region for Amazon S3 and Amazon Rekognition. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region is an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud. It does not automatically encrypt the images at rest or in transit, and it does not opt out of data usage for service improvement. It also requires migrating the data and the application to a different Region, which may incur additional costs and complexity5
• Option D enables client-side encryption on the S3 bucket. This means that the client is responsible for encrypting and decrypting the images before uploading or downloading them from the bucket.This adds extra overhead and complexity to the client application, and it does not encrypt the data in transit when calling the Amazon Rekognition API. It also does not opt out of data usage for service improvement.

References:

• 1: Protecting Data Using Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS–Managed Keys (SSE-KMS) - Amazon Simple Storage Service
• 2: Opting Out of Content Storage and Use for Service Improvements - Amazon Rekognition
• 3: HTTPS - Wikipedia
• 4: Working with Stored Faces - Amazon Rekognition
• 5: AWS GovCloud (US) - Amazon Web Services
• : Protecting Data Using Client-Side Encryption - Amazon Simple Storage Service

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

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

References:

• AWS Greengrass Machine Learning Inference - Amazon Web Services
• Machine learning components - AWS IoT Greengrass
• What is AWS Greengrass? | AWS IoT Core | Onica
• GitHub - aws-samples/aws-greengrass-ml-deployment-sample
• AWS IoT Greengrass Architecture and Its Benefits | Quick Guide - XenonStack

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

References:

• Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning | Implementations | AWS Solutions
• Detect fraudulent transactions using machine learning with Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• 1. Introduction — Reproducible Machine Learning for Credit Card Fraud Detection

The correct answer is D because it allows the company to use the existing SageMaker endpoint and leverage the built-in functionality of production variants for A/B testing. Production variants can be used to test ML models that have been trained using different training datasets, algorithms, and ML frameworks; test how they perform on different instance types; or a combination of all of the above1. By specifying the weight for each production variant in the endpoint configuration, the company can control how much traffic to send to each variant. By setting the TargetVariant header in the request, the company can invoke aspecific variant directly for each request2. This enables the company to implement the required A/B testing setup without creating additional endpoints or load balancers.

References:

• 1: Production variants - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: A/B Testing ML models in production using Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

The solution that will meet the requirements with the least amount of customization to transform and store the ingested data is to use Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to read and aggregate the data hourly, transform the data and store it in Amazon S3 by using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. This solution leverages the built-in features of Kinesis Data Analytics to perform SQL queries on streaming data and generate hourly summaries. Kinesis Data Analytics can also output the transformed data to Kinesis Data Firehose, which can then deliver the data to S3 in a specified format and partitioning scheme. This solution does not require any custom code or additional infrastructure to process the data. The other solutions either require more customization (such as using Lambda or EMR) or do not meet the requirement of aggregating the data hourly (such as using Lambda to read the data from Kinesis Data Streams). References:

• 1: Boosting Resiliency with an ML-based Telemetry Analytics Architecture | AWS Architecture Blog
• 2: AWS Cloud Data Ingestion Patterns and Practices
• 3: IoT ingestion and Machine Learning analytics pipeline with AWS IoT …
• 4: AWS IoT Data Ingestion Simplified 101: The Complete Guide - Hevo Data

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

• It minimizes the effort that is needed to set up infrastructure for the ingestion and transformation, as AWS Glue is a fully managed service that provides a serverless Apache Spark environment, a graphical interface to define data sources and targets, and a code generation feature to create and edit scripts1.
• It automates the extraction and transformation process, as AWS Glue can schedule the job to run monthly, and handle the connection, authentication, and configuration of the Amazon Redshift cluster and the S3 bucket2.
• It minimizes the load on the Amazon Redshift cluster, as AWS Glue can read the data from the cluster in parallel and use a JDBC connection that supports SSL encryption3.
• It performs the required transformations, as AWS Glue can use the built-in transforms Filter, Map, and RenameField to remove the rows with NULL values, split the timestamp column into date and time columns, and rename the card name column, respectively4.

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

• A: Setting up an Amazon EMR cluster and creating an Apache Spark job to read the data from the Amazon Redshift cluster and transform the data is not the most efficient or convenient solution, as it requires more effort and resources to provision, configure, and manage the EMR cluster, and to write and maintain the Spark code5.
• B: Setting up an Amazon EC2 instance with a SQL client tool to query the data from the Amazon Redshift cluster directly and export the resulting dataset into a CSV file is not ascalable or reliable solution, as it depends on the availability and performance of the EC2 instance, and the manual execution and upload of the SQL queries and the CSV file6.
• D: Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to run a query that writes the data directly to the S3 bucket and creating an AWS Lambda function to run the query monthly is not a feasible solution, as Amazon Redshift Spectrum does not support writing data to external tables or S3 buckets, only reading data from them7.

References:

• 1: What Is AWS Glue? - AWS Glue
• 2: Populating the Data Catalog - AWS Glue
• 3: Best Practices When Using AWS Glue with Amazon Redshift - AWS Glue
• 4: Built-In Transforms - AWS Glue
• 5: What Is Amazon EMR? - Amazon EMR
• 6: Amazon EC2 - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• 7: Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to Query External Data - Amazon Redshift

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

• Managing missing values in your target and related datasets with automated imputation support in Amazon Forecast
• Imputation by feature importance (IBFI): A methodology to impute missing data in large datasets
• Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) Explained

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

• XGBoost Parameters

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

• Connect to SageMaker by using a VPC interface endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink. This allows the ML engineer to access SageMaker services and resources without exposing the traffic to the public internet. This reduces the risk of data leakage and unauthorized access1
• Enable network isolation for training jobs and models. This prevents the training jobs and models from accessing the internet or other AWS services. This ensures that the data used for training and inference is not exposed to external sources2
• Protect data with encryption at rest and in transit. Use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to manage encryption keys. This enables the ML engineer to encrypt the data stored in Amazon S3buckets, SageMaker notebook instances, and SageMaker endpoints. It also allows the ML engineer to encrypt the data in transit between SageMaker and other AWS services. This helps protect the data from unauthorized access and tampering3

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

• Use SCPs to restrict access to SageMaker. SCPs are used to define the maximum permissions for an organization or organizational unit (OU) in AWS Organizations. They do not control the data egress from SageMaker, but rather the access to SageMaker itself4
• Disable root access on the SageMaker notebook instances. This prevents the users from installing additional packages or libraries on the notebook instances. It does not prevent the data from being transferred out of the notebook instances.
• Restrict notebook presigned URLs to specific IPs used by the company. This limits the access to the notebook instances from certain IP addresses. It does not prevent the data from being transferred out of the notebook instances.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Interface VPC Endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: Network Isolation - Amazon SageMaker
• 3: Encrypt Data at Rest and in Transit - Amazon SageMaker
• 4: Using Service Control Policies - AWS Organizations
• : Disable Root Access - Amazon SageMaker
• : Create a Presigned Notebook Instance URL - Amazon SageMaker

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 transcribeaudio 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

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

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

The 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

 Initializing the words by word2vec embeddings pretrained on a large collection of news articles related to the energy sector will provide the maximum performance boost for the LSTM model. Word2vec is a technique that learns distributed representations of words based on their co-occurrence in a large corpus of text. These representations capture semantic and syntactic similarities between words, which can help the LSTM model better understand the meaning and context of the sentences in the text documents. Using word2vec embeddings that are pretrained on a relevant domain (energy sector) can further improve the performance by reducing the vocabulary mismatch and increasing the coverage of the words in the text documents. References:

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Text Classification with TF-IDF, LSTM, BERT: a comparison of performance
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Machine Learning - Exam Preparation Path

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.

References:

• Concept Drift - Amazon SageMaker
• Detecting and Handling Concept Drift - Amazon SageMaker
• Machine Learning Concepts - Amazon Machine Learning

The correct solution for changing the scaling behavior of the SageMaker instances is to increase the cooldown period for the scale-out activity. The cooldown period is the amount of time, in seconds, after a scaling activity completes before another scaling activity can start. By increasing the cooldown period for the scale-out activity, the ML team can ensure that the new instances are ready before launching additional instances. This will prevent over-scaling and reduce costs1

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

• Option A decreases the cooldown period for the scale-in activity and increases the configured maximum capacity of instances. This option does not address the issue of launching additional instances before the new instances are ready. It may also cause under-scaling and performance degradation.
• Option B replaces the current endpoint with a multi-model endpoint using SageMaker. A multi-model endpoint is an endpoint that can host multiple models using a single endpoint. It does not affect the scaling behavior of the SageMaker instances. It also requires creating a new endpoint and updating the application code to use it2
• Option C sets up Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to trigger the SageMaker inference endpoint. Amazon API Gateway is a service that allows users to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs. AWS Lambda is a service that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. These services do not affect the scaling behavior of the SageMaker instances. They also require creating and configuring additional resources and services34

References:

• 1: Automatic Scaling - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: Create a Multi-Model Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker
• 3: Amazon API Gateway - Amazon Web Services
• 4: AWS Lambda - Amazon Web Services

 The modeling technique that the Machine Learning Specialist should use is binary classification. Binary classification is a type of supervised learning that predicts whether an input belongs to one of two possibleclasses. In this case, the input is the customer’s recent usage data and the output is whether or not the customer is likely to switch to a competitor in the next 30 days. This is a binary outcome, either yes or no, so binary classification is suitable for this problem. The other options are not appropriate for this problem. Time-series prediction is a type of supervised learning that forecasts future values based on past and present data. Anomaly detection is a type of unsupervised learning that identifies outliers or abnormal patterns in the data. Regression is a type of supervised learning that estimates a continuous numerical value based on the input features. References: Binary Classification, Time Series Prediction, Anomaly Detection, Regression

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

To leverage the NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon EC2 P3 instances, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to build the Docker container to be NVIDIA-Docker compatible. NVIDIA-Docker is a tool that enables GPU-accelerated containers to run on Docker. It automatically configures the container to access the NVIDIA drivers and libraries on the host system. The Specialist does not need to bundle the NVIDIA drivers with the Docker image, as they are already installed on the EC2 P3 instances. The Specialist does not need to organize the Docker container’s file structure to execute on GPU instances, as this is not relevant for GPU compatibility. The Specialist does not need to set the GPU flag in the Amazon SageMaker Create TrainingJob request body, as this is only required for using Elastic Inference accelerators, not EC2 P3 instances. References: NVIDIA-Docker, Using GPU-Accelerated Containers, Using Elastic Inference in Amazon SageMaker

The Amazon SageMaker k-Nearest-Neighbors (kNN) algorithm is a supervised learning algorithm that can perform both classification and regression tasks. It can also handle time series data, such as the air quality data in this case. The kNN algorithm works by finding the k most similar instances in the training data to a given query instance, and then predicting the output based on the average or majority of the outputs of the k nearest neighbors. The kNN algorithm can be configured to use different distance metrics, such as Euclidean or cosine, to measure the similarity between instances. To use the kNN algorithm on the single time series consisting of the full year of data, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to set the predictor_type parameter to regressor, as the output variable (air quality in parts per million of contaminates) is a continuous value. The kNN algorithm can then forecast the air quality for the next 2 days by finding the k most similar days in the past year and averaging their air quality values.

References:

• Amazon SageMaker k-Nearest-Neighbors (kNN) Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker
• Time Series Forecasting using k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) in Python | by …
• Time Series Forecasting with k-Nearest Neighbors | by Nishant Malik …

The best way to fix the problem without changing the Lambda code or data in DynamoDB is to add the unrecognized words as synonyms in the custom slot type. This way, Amazon Lex can resolve the synonyms to the corresponding slot values and pass them to the Lambda function. For example, if the slot type has a value “comedy” with synonyms “funny”, “fun”, and “humor”, then any of these words entered by the user will be resolved to “comedy” and the Lambda function can query the DynamoDB table for the book titles in that category. Adding synonyms to the custom slot type can be done easily using the Amazon Lex console or API, and does not require any code changes.

The other options are not correct because:

• Option A: Adding the unrecognized words in the enumeration values list as new values in the slot type would not fix the problem, because the Lambda function and the DynamoDB table are not aware of these new values. The Lambda function would not be able to query the DynamoDB table for the book titles in the new categories, and the request would still fail. Moreover, adding new values to the slot type would increase the complexity and maintenance of the chatbot, as the Lambda function and the DynamoDB table would have to be updated accordingly.
• Option B: Creating a new custom slot type, adding the unrecognized words to this slot type as enumeration values, and using this slot type for the slot would also not fix the problem, for the same reasons as option A. The Lambda function and the DynamoDB table would not be able to handle the new slot type and its values, and the request would still fail. Furthermore, creating a new slot type would require more effort and time than adding synonyms to the existing slot type.
• Option C: Using the AMAZON.SearchQuery built-in slot types for custom searches in the database is not a suitable approach for this use case. The AMAZON.SearchQuery slot type is used to capture free-form user input that corresponds to a search query. However, this slot type does not perform any validation or resolution of the user input, and passes the raw input to the Lambda function. This means that the Lambda function would have to handle the logic of parsing and matching the user input to the DynamoDB table, which would require changing the Lambda code and adding more complexity to the solution.

References:

• Custom slot type - Amazon Lex
• Using Synonyms - Amazon Lex
• Built-in Slot Types - Amazon Lex

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

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

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

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

Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) is a technique that assigns a weight to each word in a document based on how important it is to the meaning of the document. The term frequency (TF) measures how often a word appears in a document, while the inverse document frequency (IDF) measures how rare a word is across a collection of documents. The TF-IDF weight is the product of the TF and IDF values, and it is high for words that are frequent in a specific document but rare in the overall corpus. TF-IDF can help improve the validation accuracy of a sentiment analysis model by reducing the impact of common words that have little or no sentiment value, such as “the”, “a”, “and”, etc. Scikit-learn is a popular Python library for machine learning that provides a TF-IDF vectorizer class that can transform a collection of text documents into a matrix of TF-IDF features. By using this tool, the Data Scientist can create a more informative and discriminative feature representation for the sentiment analysis task.

References:

• TfidfVectorizer - scikit-learn
• Text feature extraction - scikit-learn
• TF-IDF for Beginners | by Jana Schmidt | Towards Data Science
• Sentiment Analysis: Concept, Analysis and Applications | by Susan Li | Towards Data Science

The most secure action to protect the data from being accessed and transferred to a remote host by malicious code accidentally installed on the training container is to enable network isolation for training jobs. Network isolation is a feature that allows you to run training and inference containers in internet-free mode, which blocks any outbound network calls from the containers, even to other AWS services such as Amazon S3. Additionally, no AWS credentials are made available to the container runtime environment. This way, you can prevent unauthorized access to your data and resources by malicious code or users. You can enable network isolation by setting the EnableNetworkIsolation parameter to True when you call CreateTrainingJob, CreateHyperParameterTuningJob, or CreateModel.

References:

• Run Training and Inference Containers in Internet-Free Mode - Amazon SageMaker

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

References:

• Build high performing image classification models using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
• The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning
• Data augmentation for improving deep learning in image classification problem
• Class-Adaptive Data Augmentation for Image Classification

The best 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.

References:

•Analyze and Visualize

•Transform and Export

•SMOTE for Imbalanced Classification with Python

•Churn prediction using Amazon SageMaker built-in tabular algorithms LightGBM, CatBoost, TabTransformer, and AutoGluon-Tabular

A naive Bayesian model assumes that the features are conditionally independent given the class label. This means that the joint probability of the features and the class can be factorized as the product of the class prior and the feature likelihoods. A full Bayesian network, on the other hand, does not make this assumption and allows for modeling arbitrary dependencies between the features and the class using a directed acyclic graph. In this case, the joint probability of the features and the class is given by the product of the conditional probabilities of each node given its parents in the graph. If the features are statistically dependent, meaning that their correlation coefficients are not close to zero, then a naive Bayesian model would not capture these dependencies and would likely perform worse than a full Bayesian network that can account for them. Therefore, a full Bayesian network describes the underlying data better in this situation. References:

• Naive Bayes and Text Classification I
• Bayesian Networks

 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.

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

References:

• Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs / ConvNets)
• PyTorch ResNet: The Basics and a Quick Tutorial

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

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Dimensionality Reduction for Machine Learning
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Deep Learning with Amazon SageMaker

 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

 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.

References:

• 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]

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

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Certification Exam Guide
• AWS Machine Learning Training: Model Evaluation
• How to Fix k-Fold Cross-Validation for Imbalanced Classification

The combination of steps that will meet the requirements are to create an IAM role in the development account that the integration account and production account can assume, attach IAM policies to the role that allow access to the feature repository and the S3 buckets, and share the feature repository that is associated with the S3 buckets from the development account to the integration account and the production account by using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). This approach will enable cross-account access and sharing of the features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store and Amazon S3.

Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a fully managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, search, and share curated data used in training and prediction workflows. The service provides feature management capabilities such as enabling easy feature reuse, low latency serving, time travel, and ensuring consistency between features used in training and inference workflows. A feature group is a logical grouping of ML features whose organization and structure is defined by a feature group schema. A feature group schema consists of a list of feature definitions, each of which specifies the name, type, and metadata of a feature. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store stores the features in both an online store and an offline store. The online store is a low-latency, high-throughput store that is optimized for real-time inference. The offline storeis ahistorical store that is backed by an Amazon S3 bucket and is optimized for batch processing and model training1.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization). An IAM role is an IAM identity that you can create in your account that has specific permissions. You can use an IAM role to delegate access to users, applications, or services that don’t normally have access to your AWS resources. For example, you can create an IAM role in your development account that allows the integration account and the production account to assume the role and access the resources in the development account. You can attach IAM policies to the role that specify the permissions for the feature repository and the S3 buckets. You can also use IAM conditions to restrict the access based on the source account, IP address, or other factors2.

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) is a service that enables you to easily and securely share AWS resources with any AWS account or within your AWS Organization. You can share AWS resources that you own with other accounts using resource shares. A resource share is an entity that defines the resources that you want to share, and the principals that you want to share with. For example, you can share the feature repository that is associated with the S3 buckets from the development account to the integration account and the production account by creating a resource share in AWS RAM. You can specify the feature group ARN and the S3 bucket ARN as the resources, and the integration account ID and the production account ID as the principals. You can also use IAM policies to further control the access to the shared resources3.

The other options are either incorrect or unnecessary. Using AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) from the integration account and the production account to retrieve credentials for the development account is not required, as the IAM role in the development account can provide temporary security credentials for the cross-account access. Setting up S3 replication between the development S3 buckets and the integration and production S3 buckets would introduce redundancy and inconsistency, as the S3 buckets are already shared through AWS RAM. Creating an AWS PrivateLink endpoint in the development account for SageMaker is not relevant, as it is used to securely connect to SageMaker services from a VPC, not from another account.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store – Amazon Web Services
• 2: What Is IAM? - AWS Identity and Access Management
• 3: What Is AWS Resource Access Manager? - AWS Resource Access Manager

• Option A is correct because SageMaker Pipelines is a service that enables you to create and manage automated workflows for your machine learning projects. You can use SageMaker Pipelines to orchestrate the steps of data extraction, model training, and model deployment in a repeatable and scalable way1.
• Option B is correct because SageMaker Model Monitor is a service that monitors the quality of your models in production and alerts you when there are deviations in the model quality. You can use SageMaker Model Monitor to set an accuracy threshold for your model and configure a CloudWatch alarm that triggers when the threshold is exceeded. You can then connect the alarm to the workflow in SageMaker Pipelines to automatically initiate retraining and deployment of a new version of the model2.
• Option C is incorrect because it is not the most operationally efficient way to maintain the model’s accuracy. Creating a daily SageMaker Processing job that reads the predictions from Amazon S3 and checks for changes in model prediction accuracy is a manual and time-consuming process. It also requires you to write custom code to perform the data analysis and send the email notification. Moreover, it does not automatically retrain and deploy the model when the accuracy drops.
• Option D is incorrect because it is not the most operationally efficient way to maintain the model’s accuracy. Rerunning the steps in the Jupyter notebook that is hosted on SageMaker Studio notebooks to retrain the model and redeploy a new version of the model is a manual and error-proneprocess. It also requires you to monitor the model’s performance and initiate the retraining and deployment steps yourself. Moreover, it does not leverage the benefits of SageMaker Pipelines and SageMaker Model Monitor to automate and streamline the workflow.
• Option E is incorrect because it is not the most operationally efficient way to maintain the model’s accuracy. Exporting the training and deployment code from the SageMaker Studio notebooks into a Python script and packaging the script into an Amazon ECS task that an AWS Lambda function can initiate is a complex and cumbersome process. It also requires you to manage the infrastructure and resources for the Amazon ECS task and the AWS Lambda function. Moreover, it does not leverage the benefits of SageMaker Pipelines and SageMaker Model Monitor to automate and streamline the workflow.

References:

• 1: SageMaker Pipelines - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: Monitor data and model quality - Amazon SageMaker

The AnalyzeDocument API action is the best option to generate a confidence score for each page of each contract. This API action analyzes an input document for relationships between detected items. The input document can be an image file in JPEG or PNG format, or a PDF file. The output is a JSON structure that contains the extracted data from the document. The FeatureTypes parameter specifies the types of analysis to perform on the document. The available feature types are TABLES, FORMS, and SIGNATURES. By setting the FeatureTypes parameter to SIGNATURES, the API action will detect and extract information about signatures from the document. The output will include a list of SignatureDetection objects, each containing information about a detected signature, such as its location and confidence score. The confidence score is a value between 0 and 100 that indicates the probability that the detected signature is correct. The output will also include a list of Block objects, each representing a document page. Each Block object will have a Page attribute that contains the page number and a Confidence attribute that contains the confidence score for the page. The confidence score for the page is the average of the confidence scores of the blocks that are detected on the page. The law firm can use the AnalyzeDocument API action to generate a confidence score for each page of each contract by using the SIGNATURES feature type and returning the confidence scores from the SignatureDetection and Block objects.

The other options are not suitable for generating a confidence score for each page of each contract. The Prediction API call is not an Amazon Textract API action, but a generic term for making inference requests to a machine learning model. The StartDocumentAnalysis API action is used to start an asynchronous job to analyze a document. The output is a job identifier (JobId) that is used to get the results of the analysis with the GetDocumentAnalysis API action. The GetDocumentAnalysis API action is used to get the results of a document analysis started by the StartDocumentAnalysis API action. The output is a JSON structure that contains the extracted data from the document. However, both the StartDocumentAnalysis and the GetDocumentAnalysis API actions do not support the SIGNATURES feature type, and therefore cannot detect signatures or provide confidence scores for them.

References:

•AnalyzeDocument

•SignatureDetection

•Block

•Amazon Textract launches the ability to detect signatures on any document

 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

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

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

• Data Transformations for Machine Learning
• Quantile Binning Transformation

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

• Use Amazon Rekognition to identify celebrities in the pictures. Amazon Rekognition is a service that can analyze images and videos and extract insights such as faces, objects, scenes, emotions, and more. Amazon Rekognition also provides a feature called Celebrity Recognition, which can recognize thousands of celebrities across a number of categories, such as politics, sports, entertainment, and media. Amazon Rekognition can return the name, face, and confidence score of the recognized celebrities, as well as additional information such as URLs and biographies1.
• Use AWS CloudTrail to capture IP address and timestamp details. AWS CloudTrail is a service that can record the API calls and events made by or on behalf of AWS accounts. AWS CloudTrail can provide information such as the source IP address, the user identity, the request parameters, and the response elements of the API calls. AWS CloudTrail can also deliver the event records to an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon CloudWatch Logs group for further analysis and auditing2.

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option A: Using AWS Panorama to identify celebrities in the pictures and using AWS CloudTrail to capture IP address and timestamp details will not meet the requirements effectively. AWS Panorama is a service that can extend computer vision to the edge, where it can run inference on video streams from cameras and other devices. AWS Panorama is not designed for identifying celebrities in pictures, and it may not provide accurate or relevant results. Moreover, AWS Panorama requires the use of an AWS Panorama Appliance or a compatible device, which may incur additional costs and complexity3.
• Option B: Using AWS Panorama to identify celebrities in the pictures and making calls to the AWS Panorama Device SDK to capture IP address and timestamp details will not meet the requirements effectively, for the same reasons as option A. Additionally, making calls to the AWS Panorama Device SDK will require more development effort than using AWS CloudTrail, as it will involve writing custom code and handling errors and exceptions4.
• Option D: Using Amazon Rekognition to identify celebrities in the pictures and using the text detection feature to capture IP address and timestamp details will not meet the requirements effectively. The text detection feature of Amazon Rekognition is used to detect and recognize text in images and videos, such as street names, captions, product names, and license plates. It is not suitable for capturing IP address and timestamp details, as these are not part of the pictures that users upload. Moreover, the text detection feature may not be accurate or reliable, as it depends on the quality and clarity of the text in the images and videos5.

References:

• 1: Amazon Rekognition Celebrity Recognition
• 2: AWS CloudTrail Overview
• 3: AWS Panorama Overview
• 4: AWS Panorama Device SDK
• 5: Amazon Rekognition Text Detection

• 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.

References:

• 1: Image classification algorithm - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

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

• K-Means Clustering: A tutorial on how to use K-means clustering with Amazon SageMaker.
• Unsupervised Learning: A video that explains the concept and applications of unsupervised learning.

The 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:

References:

• [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.

 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

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

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

References:

•How Hyperparameter Tuning Works

•Best Practices for Hyperparameter Tuning

•HyperparameterTuner

•Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now provides up to three times faster hyperparameter tuning with Hyperband

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that can catalogue, clean, enrich, and move data between various data stores. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that can run SQL queries on data stored in Amazon S3. By using AWS Glue to catalogue the data and Amazon Athena to run queries, the Machine Learning Specialist can leverage the existing data in Amazon S3 without any additional data transformation or loading. This solution requires the least effort compared to the other options, which involve more complex and costly data processing and storage services. References: AWS Glue, Amazon Athena