Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 - AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty

The best solution for this scenario is to use SageMaker Clarify to generate the explanation report and attach it to the predicted results. SageMaker Clarify provides tools to help explain how machine learning (ML) models make predictions using a model-agnostic feature attribution approach based on SHAP values. It can also detect and measure potential bias in the data and the model. SageMaker Clarify can generate explanation reports during data preparation, model training, and model deployment. The reports include metrics, graphs, and examples that help understand the model behavior and predictions. The reports can be attached to the predicted results using the SageMaker SDK or the SageMaker API.

The other solutions are less optimal because they require more development effort and additional services. Using SageMaker Model Debugger would require modifying the training script to save the model output tensors and writing custom rules to debug and explain the predictions. Using AWS Lambda would require writing code to invoke the ML model, compute the feature importance and partial dependence plots, and generate and attach the explanation report. Using custom Amazon CloudWatch metrics would require writing code to publish the metrics, create dashboards, and generate and attach the explanation report.

Bias Detection and Model Explainability - Amazon SageMaker Clarify - AWS

Amazon SageMaker Clarify Model Explainability

Amazon SageMaker Clarify: Machine Learning Bias Detection and Explainability

GitHub - aws/amazon-sagemaker-clarify: Fairness Aware Machine Learning

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

Feature engineering - Machine Learning Lens

Feature Selection For Machine Learning in Python

The 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 store is a historical 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.

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

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

According to the AWS documentation:​

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

Additionally:​

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

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

The best technique to improve the recall of the MLP for the target class of interest is to add class weights to the MLP’s loss function and then retrain. Class weights are a way of assigning different importance to each class in the dataset, such that the model will pay more attention to the classes with higher weights. This can help mitigate the class imbalance problem, where the model tends to favor the majority class and ignore the minority class. By increasing the weight of the target class of interest, the model will try to reduce the false negatives and increase the true positives, which will improve the recall metric. Adding class weights to the loss function is also a quick and easy solution, as it does not require gathering more data, changing the model architecture, or switching to a different algorithm.

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training - Deep Learning with Amazon SageMaker

AWS Machine Learning Training - Class Imbalance and Weighted Loss Functions

 The solution A will meet the requirements with the least amount of effort from the internal team because it uses Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels, which are fully managed services that can provide the desired functionality. The solution A involves the following steps:

Set up a private workforce that consists of the internal team. Use the private workforce and the SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature to label the data. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is a service that can create high-quality training datasets for machine learning by using human labelers. A private workforce is a group of labelers that the company can manage and control. The internal team can use the private workforce to label the satellite images as having solar panels or not. The SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature can reduce the labeling effort by using a machine learning model to automatically label the easy examples and only send the difficult ones to the human labelers1.

Use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels for model training and hosting. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is a service that can train and deploy custom machine learning models for image analysis. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can use the labeled data from SageMaker Ground Truth to train a model that can detect solar panels in satellite images. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can also host the model and provide an API endpoint for inference2.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option B: Setting up a private workforce that consists of the internal team, using the private workforce to label the data, and using Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels for model training and hosting will incur more effort from the internal team than using SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature. The internal team will have to label all the images manually, without the assistance of the machine learning model that can automate some of the labeling tasks1.

Option C: Setting up a private workforce that consists of the internal team, using the private workforce and the SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature to label the data, using the SageMaker Object Detection algorithm to train a model, and using SageMaker batch transform for inference will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels. The company will have to manage the SageMaker training job, the model artifact, and the batch transform job. Moreover, SageMaker batch transform is not suitable for real-time inference, as it processes the data in batches and stores the results in Amazon S33.

Option D: Setting up a public workforce, using the public workforce to label the data, using the SageMaker Object Detection algorithm to train a model, and using SageMaker batch transform for inference will incur more operational overhead and cost than using a private workforce and Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels. A public workforce is a group of labelers from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace. The company will have to pay the public workforce for each labeling task, and it may not have full control over the quality and security of the labeled data. The company will also have to manage the SageMaker training job, the model artifact, and the batch transform job, as explained in option C4.

1: Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth

2: Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels

3: Amazon SageMaker Object Detection

4: Amazon Mechanical Turk

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.