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

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

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

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

The other options are not suitable because:

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

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

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

1: Amazon Elastic Inference

2: How to Scale Amazon SageMaker Endpoints

3: Deploying Models to Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services

4: Updating Models in Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services

5: Burstable Performance Instances

The most direct approach to solve this problem within 2 days is to train a custom classifier by using Amazon Comprehend. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that can analyze text and extract insights such as sentiment, entities, topics, and syntax. Amazon Comprehend also provides a custom classification feature that allows users to create and train a custom text classifier using their own labeled data. The custom classifier can then be used to categorize any text document into one or more custom classes. For this use case, the custom classifier can be trained to identify reviews that express concerns over product durability as a class, and use the star rating, review text, and review summary fields as input features. The custom classifier can be created and trained using the Amazon Comprehend console or API, and does not require any coding or machine learning expertise. The training process is fully managed and scalable, and can handle large and complex datasets. The custom classifier can be trained and ready to review in 2 days or less, depending on the size and quality of the dataset.

The other options are not the most direct approaches because:

Option B: Building a recurrent neural network (RNN) in Amazon SageMaker by using Gluon and Apache MXNet is a more complex and time-consuming approach that requires coding and machine learning skills. RNNs are a type of deep learning models that can process sequential data, such as text, and learn long-term dependencies between tokens. Gluon is a high-level API for MXNet that simplifies the development of deep learning models. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides tools and frameworks for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. However, to use this approach, the machine learning specialist would have to write custom code to preprocess the data, define the RNN architecture, train the model, and evaluate the results. This would likely take more than 2 days and involve more administrative overhead.

Option C: Training a built-in BlazingText model using Word2Vec mode in Amazon SageMaker is not a suitable approach for text classification. BlazingText is a built-in algorithm in Amazon SageMaker that provides highly optimized implementations of the Word2Vec and text classification algorithms. The Word2Vec algorithm is useful for generating word embeddings, which are dense vector representations of words that capture their semantic and syntactic similarities. However, word embeddings alone are not sufficient for text classification, as they do not account for the context and structure of the text documents. To use this approach, the machine learning specialist would have to combine the word embeddings with another classifier model, such as a logistic regression or a neural network, which would add more complexity and time to the solution.

Option D: Using a built-in seq2seq model in Amazon SageMaker is not a relevant approach for text classification. Seq2seq is a built-in algorithm in Amazon SageMaker that provides a sequence-to-sequence framework for neural machine translation based on MXNet. Seq2seq is a supervised learning algorithm that can generate an output sequence of tokens given an input sequence of tokens, such as translating a sentence from one language to another. However, seq2seq is not designed for text classification, which requires assigning a label or a category to a text document, not generating another text sequence. To use this approach, the machine learning specialist would have to modify the seq2seq algorithm to fit the text classification task, which would be challenging and inefficient.

Custom Classification - Amazon Comprehend

Build a Text Classification Model with Amazon Comprehend - AWS Machine Learning Blog

Recurrent Neural Networks - Gluon API

BlazingText Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Sequence-to-Sequence Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

 Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena are technologies that meet the company’s requirements for a temporary ad hoc solution for machine learning data storage and query. Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena have the following features and benefits:

Amazon S3 is a service that provides scalable, durable, and secure object storage for any type of data. Amazon S3 can store csv and JSON files, as well as other formats, and can handle large volumes of data with high availability and performance. Amazon S3 also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena, for further processing and analysis of the data.

Amazon Athena is a service that allows querying data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena can query over semi-structured data, such as JSON, as well as structured data, such as csv, without requiring any loading or transformation. Amazon Athena is serverless, meaning that there is no infrastructure to manage and users only pay for the queries they run. Amazon Athena also supports the use of AWS Glue Data Catalog, which is a centralized metadata repository that can store and manage the schema and partition information of the data in Amazon S3.

Using Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena, the company can achieve the following high priorities:

Solution simplicity: Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena are easy to use and require minimal configuration and maintenance. The company can simply upload the csv and JSON files to Amazon S3 and use Amazon Athena to query them using SQL. The company does not need to worry about provisioning, scaling, or managing any servers or clusters.

Fast development time: Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena can enable the company to quickly access and analyze the data without any data preparation or loading. The company can use the existing workforce of SQL experts to write and run queries on Amazon Athena and get results in seconds or minutes.

Low cost: Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena are cost-effective and offer pay-as-you-go pricing models. Amazon S3 charges based on the amount of storage used and the number of requests made. Amazon Athena charges based on the amount of data scanned by the queries. The company can also reduce the costs by using compression, encryption, and partitioning techniques to optimize the data storage and query performance.

High flexibility: Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena are flexible and can support various data types, formats, and sources. The company can store and query any type of data in Amazon S3, such as csv, JSON, Parquet, ORC, etc. The company can also query data from multiple sources in Amazon S3, such as data lakes, data warehouses, log files, etc.

The other options are not as suitable as option A for the company’s requirements for the following reasons:

Option B: Amazon Redshift and AWS Glue are technologies that can be used for data warehousing and data integration, but they are not ideal for a temporary ad hoc solution. Amazon Redshift is a service that provides a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse that can run complex analytical queries using SQL. AWS Glue is a service that provides a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that can prepare and load data for analytics. However, using Amazon Redshift and AWS Glue would require more effort and cost than using Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena. The company would need to load the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Redshift using AWS Glue, which can take time and incur additional charges. The company would also need to manage the capacity and performance of the Amazon Redshift cluster, which can be complex and expensive.

Option C: Amazon DynamoDB and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) are technologies that can be used for fast and scalable NoSQL database and caching, but they are not suitable for the company’s data storage and query needs. Amazon DynamoDB is a service that provides a fully managed, key-value and document database that can deliver single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a service that provides a fully managed, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that can improve the read performance by up to 10 times. However, using Amazon DynamoDB and DAX would not allow the company to continue to use SQL as a query language, as Amazon DynamoDB does not support SQL. The company would need to use the DynamoDB API or the AWS SDKs to access and query the data, which can require more coding and learning effort. The company would also need to transform the csv and JSON files into DynamoDB items, which can involve additional processing and complexity.

Option D: Amazon RDS and Amazon ES are technologies that can be used for relational database and search and analytics, but they are not optimal for the company’s data storage and query scenario. Amazon RDS is a service that provides a fully managed, relational database that supports various database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. Amazon ES is a service that provides a fully managed, Elasticsearch cluster, which is mainly used for search and analytics purposes. However, using Amazon RDS and Amazon ES would not be as simple and cost-effective as using Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena. The company would need to load the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon RDS, which can take time and incur additional charges. The company would also need to manage the capacity and performance of the Amazon RDS and Amazon ES clusters, which can be complex and expensive. Moreover, Amazon RDS and Amazon ES are not designed to handle semi-structured data, such as JSON, as well as Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena.

Amazon S3

Amazon Athena

Amazon Redshift

AWS Glue

Amazon DynamoDB

[DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)]

[Amazon RDS]

[Amazon ES]

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

Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide: Train and Test Datasets

Amazon Personalize Developer Guide: Preparing and Importing Data

To create a serverless ingestion and analytics solution for high-velocity, real-time streaming data, the Data Scientist should use the following AWS services:

AWS Glue Data Catalog: This is a managed service that acts as a central metadata repository for data assets across AWS and on-premises data sources. The Data Scientist can use AWS Glue Data Catalog to create a schema of the incoming data format, which defines the structure, format, and data types of the JSON records. The schema can be used by other AWS services to understand and process the data1.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose: This is a fully managed service that delivers real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk. The Data Scientist can use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream the data from the source and transform the data to a query-optimized, columnar format such as Apache Parquet or ORC using the AWS Glue Data Catalog before delivering to Amazon S3. This enables efficient compression, partitioning, and fast analytics on the data2.

Amazon S3: This is an object storage service that offers high durability, availability, and scalability. The Data Scientist can use Amazon S3 as the output datastore for the transformed data, which can be organized into buckets and prefixes according to the desired partitioning scheme. Amazon S3 also integrates with other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum for analytics3.

Amazon Athena: This is a serverless interactive query service that allows users to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. The Data Scientist can use Amazon Athena to run SQL queries against the data in Amazon S3 and connect to existing business intelligence dashboards using the Athena Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) connector. Amazon Athena leverages the AWS Glue Data Catalog to access the schema information and supports formats such as Parquet and ORC for fast and cost-effective queries4.

1: What Is the AWS Glue Data Catalog? - AWS Glue

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

3: What Is Amazon S3? - Amazon Simple Storage Service

4: What Is Amazon Athena? - Amazon Athena

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

Will this customer churn or not?

Will a customer renew their subscription?

Will a user downgrade a pricing plan?

Are there any signs of unusual customer behavior?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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