MLS-C01 AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Questions and Answers

A pronunciation lexicon is a file that defines how words or phrases should be pronounced by Amazon Polly. A lexicon can help customize the speech output for words that are uncommon, foreign, or have multiple pronunciations. A lexicon must conform to the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) standard and can be stored in an AWS region using the Amazon Polly API. To use a lexicon for synthesizing speech, the lexicon name must be specified in the SSML tag. For example, the following lexicon defines how to pronounce the acronym W3C:

W3C World Wide Web Consortium

To use this lexicon, the text input must include the following SSML tag:

xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis” xml:lang=“en-US” > The W3C is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

References:

Customize pronunciation using lexicons in Amazon Polly: A blog post that explains how to use lexicons for creating custom pronunciations.

Managing Lexicons: A documentation page that describes how to store and retrieve lexicons using the Amazon Polly API.

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

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

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

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

The 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.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a dimensionality reduction technique that captures the variance within the feature space, helping to understand the directions in which data varies most. In SageMaker Data Wrangler, the multicollinearity measurement and PCA features allow the data scientist to analyze interdependencies between predictor variables while reducing redundancy. PCA transforms correlated features into a set of uncorrelated components, helping to simplify the dataset without significant loss of information, making it ideal for refining features based on variance.

Options A and D offer methods to understand feature relevance but are less effective for managing multicollinearity and variance representation in the data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

Feature engineering - Machine Learning Lens

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

Feature Selection in Machine Learning | Baeldung on Computer Science

Feature Selection in Machine Learning: An easy Introduction

To secure calls to the Amazon SageMaker Service API, the ML specialist should take the following steps:

Modify the security group on the endpoint network interface to restrict access to the instances. This will allow the ML specialist to control which instances in the VPC can communicate with the VPC interface endpoint for the Amazon SageMaker Service API. The security group can specify inbound and outbound rules based on the instance IDs, IP addresses, or CIDR blocks1.

Add a SageMaker Runtime VPC endpoint interface to the VPC. This will allow the ML specialist to invoke the SageMaker endpoints from within the VPC without using the public internet. The SageMaker Runtime VPC endpoint interface connects the VPC directly to the SageMaker Runtime using AWS PrivateLink2.

The other options are not as effective or necessary as the steps above. Adding a VPC endpoint policy to allow access to the IAM users is not required, as the IAM users can already access the Amazon SageMaker Service API through the VPC interface endpoint. Modifying the users’ IAM policy to allow access to Amazon SageMaker Service API calls only is not sufficient, as it does not prevent unauthorized instances from accessing the VPC interface endpoint. Modifying the ACL on the endpoint network interface to restrict access to the instances is not possible, as network ACLs are associated with subnets, not network interfaces3.

References:

Security groups for your VPC - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker

Network ACLs - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

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

According to the Amazon Kinesis Data Streams documentation, the maximum size of data blob (the data payload before Base64-encoding) per record is 1 MB. The maximum number of records that can be sent to a shard per second is 1,000. Therefore, the maximum throughput of a shard is 1 MB/sec for input and 2 MB/sec for output. In this case, the input throughput is 100 transactions per second * 100 KB per transaction = 10 MB/sec. Therefore, the minimum number of shards required is 10 MB/sec / 1 MB/sec = 10 shards. However, the question asks for the minimum number of shards in Kinesis Data Streams, not the minimum number of shards per stream. A Kinesis Data Streams account can have multiple streams, each with its own number of shards. Therefore, the minimum number of shards in Kinesis Data Streams is 1, which is the minimum number of shards per stream. References:

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Terminology and Concepts

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Limits

CNN-QR is a proprietary machine learning algorithm for forecasting time series using causal convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNN-QR works best with large datasets containing hundreds of time series. It accepts item metadata, and is the only Forecast algorithm that accepts related time series data without future values. In this case, the power company has historical power consumption data for the last 10 years, which is a large dataset with multiple time series. The data also includes related data such as weather, number of individuals on the property, and public holidays, which can be used as item metadata or related time series data. Therefore, CNN-QR is the most suitable algorithm for this scenario. References: Amazon Forecast Algorithms, Amazon Forecast CNN-QR

 The solution that will meet the requirements with the least development time is to use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream the reservation data directly to Amazon S3, detect high-demand outliers by using Amazon QuickSight ML Insights, and visualize the data in QuickSight. This solution does not require any custom development or ML domain expertise, as it leverages the built-in features of QuickSight ML Insights to automatically run anomaly detection and generate insights on the streaming data. QuickSight ML Insights can also create a visualization dashboard that automatically refreshes with the most recent data, and allows the data scientist to explore the outliers and their key drivers. References:

1: Simplify and automate anomaly detection in streaming data with Amazon Lookout for Metrics | AWS Machine Learning Blog

2: Detecting outliers with ML-powered anomaly detection - Amazon QuickSight

3: Real-time Outlier Detection Over Streaming Data - IEEE Xplore

4: Towards a deep learning-based outlier detection … - Journal of Big Data

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

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

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:

Option A is not relevant because the Amazon Comprehend entity recognition API operations are used to detect and extract named entities from text, such as people, places, organizations, dates, etc4. This is not the same as removing stop words, which are common words that do not carry much meaning or information. Moreover, removing the detected entities from the blog post data may reduce the quality and diversity of the tag recommendations, as some entities may be relevant and useful as tags.

Option B is not optimal because the SageMaker built-in principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm is used to reduce the dimensionality of a dataset by finding the most important features that capture the maximum amount of variance in the data 5. This is not the same as removing stop words, which are words that have low variance and high frequency in the data. Moreover, replacing the blog post data in the S3 bucket with the results of the PCA algorithm may not be compatible with the input format expected by the NTM algorithm, which requires a bag-of-words representation of the text 2.

Option C is not suitable because the SageMaker built-in Object Detection algorithm is used to detect and localize objects in images 6. This is not related to the task of recommending tags from blog posts, which are text documents. Moreover, using the Object Detection algorithm instead of the NTM algorithm would require a different type of input data (images instead of text), and a different type of output data (bounding boxes and labels instead of topics and words).

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

The problem of poor performance on the test data is a sign of overfitting, which means the model has learned the training data too well and failed to generalize to new and unseen data. To correct this, the Machine Learning Specialist should consider using methods that reduce the complexity of the model and increase its ability to generalize. Some of these methods are:

Increase regularization: Regularization is a technique that adds a penalty term to the loss function of the model, which reduces the magnitude of the model weights and prevents overfitting. There are different types of regularization, such as L1, L2, and elastic net, that apply different penalties to the weights1.

Increase dropout: Dropout is a technique that randomly drops out some units or connections in the neural network during training, which reduces the co-dependency of the units and prevents overfitting. Dropout can be applied to different layers of the network, and the dropout rate can be tuned to control the amount of dropout2.

Decrease feature combinations: Feature combinations are the interactions between different input features that can be used to create new features for the model. However, too many feature combinations can increase the complexity of the model and cause overfitting. Therefore, the Specialist should decrease the number of feature combinations and select only the most relevant and informative ones for the model3.

References:

1: Regularization for Deep Learning - Amazon SageMaker

2: Dropout - Amazon SageMaker

3: Feature Engineering - Amazon SageMaker

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 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 solution for implementing the testing model with the least amount of operational overhead is to use the following steps:

Update the DesiredWeightsAndCapacity data type with the new version of the model by using the UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities operation with the DesiredWeight parameter set to 0. This operation allows the developers to update the variant weights and capacities of an existing SageMaker endpoint without deleting and recreating the endpoint. Setting the DesiredWeight parameter to 0 means that the new version of the model will not receive any traffic initially1

Specify the TargetVariant parameter for InvokeEndpoint calls for users who subscribed to the preview feature. This parameter allows the developers to override the variant weights and direct a request to a specific variant. This way, the developers can test the new version of the model for a limited number of users who opted in for the preview feature2

When the new version of the model is ready for release, gradually increase DesiredWeight until all users have the updated version. This operation allows the developers to perform a gradual rollout of the new version of the model and monitor its performance and accuracy. The developers can adjust the variant weights and capacities as needed until the new version of the model serves all the traffic1

The other options are incorrect because they either require more operational overhead or do not support the desired use cases. For example:

Option A uses the CreateEndpointConfig operation with the InitialVariantWeight parameter set to 0. This operation creates a new endpoint configuration, which requires deleting and recreating the endpoint to apply the changes. This adds extra overhead and downtime for the endpoint. It also does not support the gradual rollout of the new version of the model3

Option B uses two SageMaker hosted endpoints that serve the different versions of the model and an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to route traffic to both endpoints based on the TargetVariant query string parameter. This option requires creating and managing additional resources and services, such as the second endpoint and the ALB. It also requires changing the app code to send the query string parameter for the preview feature4

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

References:

1: UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities - Amazon SageMaker

2: InvokeEndpoint - Amazon SageMaker

3: CreateEndpointConfig - Amazon SageMaker

4: Application Load Balancer - Elastic Load Balancing

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

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

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

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

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

The other solutions have the following drawbacks:

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

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

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

References:

1: Time Series Forecasting - Amazon SageMaker

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

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

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

5: Reinforcement Learning - Amazon SageMaker

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

Amazon SageMaker notebook instances are fully managed environments that provide an integrated Jupyter notebook interface for data exploration, analysis, and machine learning. Amazon SageMaker notebook instances are based on EC2 instances that run within AWS service accounts, not within customer accounts. This means that the ML Specialist cannot find the Amazon SageMaker notebook instance’s EC2 instance or EBS volume within the VPC, as they are not visible or accessible to the customer. However, the ML Specialist can still take a snapshot of the EBS volume by using the Amazon SageMaker console or API. The ML Specialist can also use VPC interface endpoints to securely connect the Amazon SageMaker notebook instance to the resources within the VPC, such as Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon EFS file systems, or Amazon RDS databases

Stratified sampling is a technique that preserves the class distribution of the original dataset when creating a smaller or split dataset. This means that the proportion of examples from each class in the original dataset is maintained in the smaller or split dataset. Stratified sampling can help improve the validation accuracy of the model by ensuring that the validation dataset is representative of the original dataset and not biased towards any class. This can reduce the variance and overfitting of the model and increase its generalization ability. Stratified sampling can be applied to both oversampling and undersampling methods, depending on whether the goal is to increase or decrease the size of the dataset.

The other options are not effective ways to improve the validation accuracy of the model. Acquiring additional data about the majority classes in the original dataset will only increase the imbalance and make the model more biased towards the majority classes. Using a smaller, randomly sampled version of the training dataset will not guarantee that the class distribution is preserved and may result in losing important information from the minority classes. Performing systematic sampling on the original dataset will also not ensure that the class distribution is preserved and may introduce sampling bias if the original dataset is ordered or grouped by class.

References:

•Stratified Sampling for Imbalanced Datasets

•Imbalanced Data

•Tour of Data Sampling Methods for Imbalanced Classification

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 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 simply enable 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

The prior probability distribution for the discrete random variable that represents the number of minutes New Yorkers wait for a bus is a Poisson distribution. A Poisson distribution is suitable for modeling the number of events that occur in a fixed interval of time or space, given a known average rate of occurrence. In this case, the event is waiting for a bus, the interval is 10 minutes, and the average rate is 3 minutes. The Poisson distribution can capture the variability of the waiting time, which can range from 0 to 10 minutes, with different probabilities.

References:

1: Poisson Distribution - Amazon SageMaker

2: Poisson Distribution - Wikipedia

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 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 possible classes. 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

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

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

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

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

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

The other options are not suitable because:

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

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

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

References:

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

2: Principal Component Analysis

3: t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

The best way to maintain the privacy and integrity of the data stored in Amazon S3 is to use a combination of VPC endpoints and S3 bucket policies. A VPC endpoint allows the SageMaker notebook instance to access the S3 bucket without going through the public internet. A bucket policy allows the S3 bucket owner to specify which VPCs or VPC endpoints can access the bucket. This way, the data is protected from unauthorized access and tampering. The other options are either insecure (A and D) or inefficient (B). References: Using Amazon S3 VPC Endpoints, Using Bucket Policies and User Policies

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

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

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

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

References:

AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized

AWS DataSync

AWS Snowcone

AWS Outposts

AWS Lambda

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

Explanation: Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that allows you to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so you only pay for the queries that you run and there is no infrastructure to manage.

To optimize the query performance of Athena, one of the best practices is to convert the data into a columnar format, such as Apache Parquet or Apache ORC. Columnar formats store data by columns rather than by rows, which allows Athena to scan only the columns that are relevant to the query, reducing the amount of data read and improving the query speed. Columnar formats also support compression and encoding schemes that can reduce the storage space and the data scanned per query, further enhancing the performance and reducing the cost.

In contrast, plaintext CSV files store data by rows, which means that Athena has to scan the entire row even if only a few columns are needed for the query. This increases the amount of data read and the query latency. Moreover, plaintext CSV files do not support compression or encoding, which means that they take up more storage space and incur higher query costs.

Therefore, the Machine Learning Specialist should transform the dataset to Apache Parquet format to minimize query runtime.

References:

Top 10 Performance Tuning Tips for Amazon Athena

Columnar Storage Formats

Using compressions will reduce the amount of data scanned by Amazon Athena, and also reduce your S3 bucket storage. It’s a Win-Win for your AWS bill. Supported formats: GZIP, LZO, SNAPPY (Parquet) and ZLIB.

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

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

References:

Deploying models to Amazon SageMaker hosting services - Amazon SageMaker

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

UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities - Amazon SageMaker

 Pushing the data from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon S3 using an AWS Data Pipeline and providing the S3 location within the notebook is the best approach for training a model using the data stored in Amazon RDS. This is because Amazon SageMaker can directly access data from Amazon S3 and train models on it. AWS Data Pipeline is a service that can automate the movement and transformation of data between different AWS services. It can also use Amazon RDS as a data source and Amazon S3 as a data destination. This way, the data can be transferred efficiently and securely without writing any code within the notebook. References:

Amazon SageMaker

AWS Data Pipeline

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

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

What is XGBoost? - Amazon SageMaker

What is Clustering? - Amazon SageMaker

K-Means Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

The company wants to predict the demand for a new product that will soon be launched, based on the sales history of similar products. This is a time series forecasting problem, which requires a machine learning algorithm that can learn from historical data and generate future predictions.

One of the most suitable solutions for this problem is to use the Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm, which is a supervised learning algorithm for forecasting scalar time series using recurrent neural networks (RNN). DeepAR can handle multiple related time series, such as the sales of different products, and learn a global model that captures the common patterns and trends across the time series. DeepAR can also generate probabilistic forecasts that provide confidence intervals and quantify the uncertainty of the predictions.

DeepAR can outperform traditional forecasting methods, such as ARIMA, especially when the dataset contains hundreds or thousands of related time series. DeepAR can also use the trained model to forecast the demand for new products that are similar to the ones it has been trained on, by using the categorical features that encode the product attributes. For example, the company can use the product type, brand, flavor, size, and price as categorical features to group the products and learn the typical behavior for each group.

Therefore, the Machine Learning Specialist should apply the Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm to forecast the demand for the new product, by using the sales history of the existing products as the training dataset, and the product attributes as the categorical features.

References:

DeepAR Forecasting Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Now available in Amazon SageMaker: DeepAR algorithm for more accurate time series forecasting

The Data Scientist should increase the XGBoost scale_pos_weight parameter to adjust the balance of positive and negative weights and change the XGBoost eval_metric parameter to optimize based on Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC). This will help reduce the number of false negative predictions by the model.

The scale_pos_weight parameter controls the balance of positive and negative weights in the XGBoost algorithm. It is useful for imbalanced classification problems, such as fraud detection, where the number of positive examples (fraudulent transactions) is much smaller than the number of negative examples (non-fraudulent transactions). By increasing the scale_pos_weight parameter, the Data Scientist can assign more weight to the positive class and make the model more sensitive to detecting fraudulent transactions.

The eval_metric parameter specifies the metric that is used to measure the performance of the model during training and validation. The default metric for binary classification problems is the error rate, which is the fraction of incorrect predictions. However, the error rate is not a good metric for imbalanced classification problems, because it does not take into account the cost of different types of errors. For example, in fraud detection, a false negative (failing to detect a fraudulent transaction) is more costly than a false positive (flagging a non-fraudulent transaction as fraudulent). Therefore, the Data Scientist should use a metric that reflects the trade-off between the true positive rate (TPR) and the false positive rate (FPR), such as the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC). The AUC is a measure of how well the model can distinguish between the positive and negative classes, regardless of the classification threshold. A higher AUC means that the model can achieve a higher TPR with a lower FPR, which is desirable for fraud detection.

References:

XGBoost Parameters - Amazon Machine Learning

Using XGBoost with Amazon SageMaker - AWS Machine Learning Blog

Parquet is a columnar storage format that can store data in a compressed and efficient way. Parquet files can improve query performance by reducing the amount of data that needs to be scanned, as only the relevant columns are read from the files. Parquet files can also support predicate pushdown, which means that the filtering conditions are applied at the storage level, further reducing the data that needs to be processed. Parquet files are compatible with Amazon Athena, which can leverage the benefits of the columnar format and provide faster and cheaper queries. Therefore, the records should be stored in Parquet files in Amazon S3 to improve query performance.

References:

Columnar Storage Formats - Amazon Athena

Parquet SerDe - Amazon Athena

Optimizing Amazon Athena Queries - Amazon Athena

Parquet - Apache Software Foundation

The best Amazon SageMaker algorithm for this task is Image Classification - TensorFlow. This algorithm is a supervised learning algorithm that supports transfer learning with many pretrained models from the TensorFlow Hub. Transfer learning allows the company to fine-tune one of the available pretrained models on their own dataset, even if a large amount of image data is not available. The image classification algorithm takes an image as input and outputs a probability for each provided class label. The company can choose from a variety of models, such as MobileNet, ResNet, or Inception, depending on their accuracy and speed requirements. The algorithm also supports distributed training, data augmentation, and hyperparameter tuning.

References:

Image Classification - TensorFlow - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker Provides New Built-in TensorFlow Image Classification Algorithm

Image Classification with ResNet :: Amazon SageMaker Workshop

Image classification on Amazon SageMaker | by Julien Simon - Medium

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 will accomplish the necessary transformation to train the Amazon SageMaker model with the least amount of administrative overhead is to crawl the data using AWS Glue crawlers, write an AWS Glue ETL job that merges the two tables and writes the output in CSV format to Amazon S3. This solution leverages the serverless capabilities of AWS Glue to automatically discover the schema of the data sources, and to perform the data integration and transformation without requiring any cluster management or configuration. The output in CSV format is compatible with Amazon SageMaker and can be easily loaded into a training job. References: AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker

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

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

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

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a service that can capture, store, and process streaming data in real time. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service that can deliver streaming data to various destinations, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can also transform the data before delivering it, such as converting the data format, compressing the data, or encrypting the data. One of the supported data formats that Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can convert to is Apache Parquet, which is a columnar storage format that can improve the performance and cost-efficiency of analytics queries. By using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, the Mobile Network Operator can ingest the .CSV data from the source systems and use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to convert the data into Parquet before storing it on Amazon S3. This solution takes the least effort to implement, as it does not require any additional resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EMR clusters, or Amazon Glue jobs. The solution can also leverage the built-in features of Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, such as data buffering, batching, retry, and error handling.

References:

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams - Amazon Web Services

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose - Amazon Web Services

Data Transformation - Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Apache Parquet - Amazon Athena

The FindMatches transform is a machine learning transform that can identify and match similar records from different datasets, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier or exact field values. The FindMatches transform can also remove duplicate records from a single dataset. The FindMatches transform can be used with AWS Glue crawlers and jobs to process the data from various sources and store it in a data lake. The FindMatches transform can be created and managed using the AWS Glue console, API, or AWS Glue Studio.

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

Option A: Using an AWS Lambda function to process the data and compare equal strings in the fields from the two datasets is not an efficient or scalable solution. It would require writing custom code and handling the data loading and cleansing logic. It would also not account for variations or inconsistencies in the field values, such as spelling errors, abbreviations, or missing data.

Option B: The AWS Glue SearchTables API operation is used to search for tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog based on a set of criteria. It is not a machine learning transform that can match records across different datasets or remove duplicates. It would also require writing custom code to invoke the API and process the results.

Option D: AWS Lake Formation does not provide a custom transform feature. It provides predefined blueprints for common data ingestion scenarios, such as database snapshot, incremental database, and log file. These blueprints do not support matching records across different datasets or removing duplicates.

The Data Scientist is building a model to predict customer churn using a dataset of 100 continuous numerical features. The Marketing team wants to interpret the model and see the direct impact of relevant features on the model outcome. However, the Data Scientist observes that there is a wide gap between the training and validation set accuracy, which indicates that the model is overfitting the data and generalizing poorly to new data.

To improve the model performance and satisfy the Marketing team’s needs, the Data Scientist can use the following methods:

Add L1 regularization to the classifier: L1 regularization is a technique that adds a penalty term to the loss function of the logistic regression model, proportional to the sum of the absolute values of the coefficients. L1 regularization can help reduce overfitting by shrinking the coefficients of the less important features to zero, effectively performing feature selection. This can simplify the model and make it more interpretable, as well as improve the validation accuracy.

Perform recursive feature elimination: Recursive feature elimination (RFE) is a feature selection technique that involves training a model on a subset of the features, and then iteratively removing the least important features one by one until the desired number of features is reached. The idea behind RFE is to determine the contribution of each feature to the model by measuring how well the model performs when that feature is removed. The features that are most important to the model will have the greatest impact on performance when they are removed. RFE can help improve the model performance by eliminating the irrelevant or redundant features that may cause noise or multicollinearity in the data. RFE can also help the Marketing team understand the direct impact of the relevant features on the model outcome, as the remaining features will have the highest weights in the model.

References:

Regularization for Logistic Regression

Recursive Feature Elimination

 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 the variance 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.

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

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

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

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

The following are not required or correct:

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

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

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

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 …

The best solution to meet the requirements is to tune the csv_weight hyperparameter and the scale_pos_weight hyperparameter by using automatic model tuning (AMT). Optimize on {“HyperParameterTuningJobObjective”: {“MetricName”: “validation:f1”, “Type”: “Maximize”}}.

The csv_weight hyperparameter is used to specify the instance weights for the training data in CSV format. This can help handle imbalanced data by assigning higher weights to the minority class examples and lower weights to the majority class examples. The scale_pos_weight hyperparameter is used to control the balance of positive and negative weights. It is the ratio of the number of negative class examples to the number of positive class examples. Setting a higher value for this hyperparameter can increase the importance of the positive class and improve the recall. Both of these hyperparameters can help the XGBoost model capture as many instances of returned items as possible.

Automatic model tuning (AMT) is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that automates the process of finding the best hyperparameter values for a machine learning model. AMT uses Bayesian optimization to search the hyperparameter space and evaluate the model performance based on a predefined objective metric. The objective metric is the metric that AMT tries to optimize by adjusting the hyperparameter values. For imbalanced classification problems, accuracy is not a good objective metric, as it can be misleading and biased towards the majority class. A better objective metric is the F1 score, which is the harmonic mean of precision and recall. The F1 score can reflect the balance between precision and recall and is more suitable for imbalanced data. The F1 score ranges from 0 to 1, where 1 is the best possible value. Therefore, the type of the objective should be “Maximize” to achieve the highest F1 score.

By tuning the csv_weight and scale_pos_weight hyperparameters and optimizing on the F1 score, the data scientist can meet the requirements most cost-effectively. This solution requires tuning only two hyperparameters, which can reduce the computation time and cost compared to tuning all possible hyperparameters. This solution also uses the appropriate objective metric for imbalanced classification, which can improve the model performance and capture more instances of returned items.

References:

•XGBoost Hyperparameters

•Automatic Model Tuning

•How to Configure XGBoost for Imbalanced Classification

•Imbalanced Data

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

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

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

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

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose - Amazon Web Services

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

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose FAQs - Amazon Web Services

AWS Glue DataBrew provides a no-code data preparation interface that enables business analysts to clean and transform data from various sources, including PostgreSQL databases, without needing programming skills. Amazon SageMaker Canvas offers a no-code interface for machine learning model training and predictions, allowing users to predict future production volume without coding expertise.

This solution meets the requirements efficiently by providing end-to-end data preparation and prediction modeling without requiring coding.

The solution C is the most likely to improve the data ingestion rate into Amazon S3 because it increases the number of shards for the data stream. The number of shards determines the throughput capacity of the data stream, which affects the rate of data ingestion. Each shard can support up to 1 MB per second of data input and 2 MB per second of data output. By increasing the number of shards, the company can increase the data ingestion rate proportionally. The company can use the UpdateShardCount API operation to modify the number of shards in the data stream1.

The other options are not likely to improve the data ingestion rate into Amazon S3 because:

Option A: Increasing the number of S3 prefixes for the delivery stream to write to will not affect the data ingestion rate, as it only changes the way the data is organized in the S3 bucket. The number of S3 prefixes can help to optimize the performance of downstream applications that read the data from S3, but it does not impact the performance of Kinesis Data Firehose2.

Option B: Decreasing the retention period for the data stream will not affect the data ingestion rate, as it only changes the amount of time the data is stored in the data stream. The retention period can help to manage the data availability and durability, but it does not impact the throughput capacity of the data stream3.

Option D: Adding more consumers using the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) will not affect the data ingestion rate, as it only changes the way the data is processed by downstream applications. The consumers can help to scale the data processing and handle failures, but they do not impact the data ingestion into S3 by Kinesis Data Firehose4.

References:

1: Resharding - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

2: Amazon S3 Prefixes - Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

3: Data Retention - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

4: Developing Consumers Using the Kinesis Client Library - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

The agency wants to analyze the census data for population segmentation, which is a type of unsupervised learning problem that aims to group similar data points together based on their attributes. The agency can use a combination of algorithms that can perform dimensionality reduction and clustering on the data to achieve this goal.

Dimensionality reduction is a technique that reduces the number of features or variables in a dataset while preserving the essential information and relationships. Dimensionality reduction can help improve the efficiency and performance of clustering algorithms, as well as facilitate data visualization and interpretation. One of the most common algorithms for dimensionality reduction is principal component analysis (PCA), which transforms the original features into a new set of orthogonal features called principal components that capture the maximum variance in the data. PCA can help reduce the noise and redundancy in the data and reveal the underlying structure and patterns.

Clustering is a technique that partitions the data into groups or clusters based on their similarity or distance. Clustering can help discover the natural segments or categories in the data and understand their characteristics and differences. One of the most popular algorithms for clustering is k-means, which assigns each data point to one of k clusters based on the nearest mean or centroid. K-means can handle large and high-dimensional datasets and produce compact and spherical clusters.

Therefore, the combination of algorithms that would provide the appropriate insights for population segmentation are PCA and k-means. The agency can use PCA to reduce the dimensionality of the census data from 500 features to a smaller number of principal components that capture most of the variation in the data. Then, the agency can use k-means to cluster the data based on the principal components and identify the segments of the population that share similar characteristics.

References:

Amazon SageMaker Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

Amazon SageMaker K-Means Algorithm

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

Linear Regression

Linear Regression with Amazon Machine Learning

Machine Learning on AWS

Collaborative filtering is a machine learning technique that recommends products or services to users based on the ratings or preferences of other users. This technique is well-suited for identifying customer shopping patterns and preferences because it takes into account the interactions between users and products.

The solution that uses Amazon Comprehend and Amazon CloudWatch is the most suitable for the given scenario. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that can analyze text and extract insights such as sentiment, entities, topics, and syntax. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that can collect and track metrics, create dashboards, and set alarms based on various thresholds. By using these services, the data science team can quickly and easily implement a solution to monitor the sentiment of social media posts without requiring much infrastructure or data science resources. The solution also meets the requirements of storing the sentiment in both S3 and CloudWatch, and using CloudWatch alarms to notify analysts of trends.

References:

Amazon Comprehend

Amazon CloudWatch

 To configure the notebook instance placement to meet the requirements, the Data Science team should associate the Amazon SageMaker notebook with a private subnet in a VPC. A VPC is a virtual network that is logically isolated from other networks in AWS. A private subnet is a subnet that has no internet gateway attached to it, and therefore cannot communicate with the internet. By placing the notebook instance in a private subnet, the team can ensure that it stays within a secured VPC with no internet access.

However, to access data stored in Amazon S3 buckets and other AWS services, the team needs to ensure that the VPC has S3 VPC endpoints and Amazon SageMaker VPC endpoints attached to it. A VPC endpoint is a gateway that enables private connections between the VPC and supported AWS services. A VPC endpoint does not require an internet gateway, a NAT device, or a VPN connection, and ensures that the traffic between the VPC and the AWS service does not leave the AWS network. By using VPC endpoints, the team can access Amazon S3 and Amazon SageMaker from the notebook instance without compromising data privacy or security.

References:

: What Is Amazon VPC? - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

: Subnet Routing - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

: VPC Endpoints - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

2: Create an Endpoint Configuration - Amazon SageMaker

3: Update an Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker

 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 way to ensure that provisioned resources are being utilized effectively is to redeploy the model on an M5 instance and attach Amazon Elastic Inference to the instance. Amazon Elastic Inference allows you to attach low-cost GPU-powered acceleration to Amazon EC2 and Amazon SageMaker instances to reduce the cost of running deep learning inference by up to 75%. By using Amazon Elastic Inference, you can choose the instance type that is best suited to the overall CPU and memory needs of your application, and then separately configure the amount of inference acceleration that you need with no code changes. This way, you can avoid wasting GPU resources and pay only for what you use.

Option A is incorrect because a batch transform job is not suitable for real-time predictions. Batch transform is a high-performance and cost-effective feature for generating inferences using your trained models. Batch transform manages all of the compute resources required to get inferences. Batch transform is ideal for scenarios where you’re working with large batches of data, don’t need sub-second latency, or need to process data that is stored in Amazon S3.

Option C is incorrect because redeploying the model on a P3dn instance would not improve the resource utilization. P3dn instances are designed for distributed machine learning and high performance computing applications that need high network throughput and packet rate performance. They are not optimized for inference workloads.

Option D is incorrect because deploying the model onto an Amazon ECS cluster using a P3 instance would not ensure that provisioned resources are being utilized effectively. Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that allows you to run and scale containerized applications on AWS. However, using Amazon ECS would not address the issue of underutilized GPU resources. In fact, it might introduce additional overhead and complexity in managing the cluster.

References:

Amazon Elastic Inference - Amazon SageMaker

Batch Transform - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon EC2 P3 Instances

Amazon EC2 P3dn Instances

Amazon Elastic Container Service

To leverage the NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon EC2 P3 instances for training a custom ResNet model using Amazon SageMaker, 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. NVIDIA-Docker can automatically configure the Docker container with the necessary drivers, libraries, and environment variables to access the NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA-Docker can also isolate the GPU resources and ensure that each container has exclusive access to a GPU.

To build a Docker container that is NVIDIA-Docker compatible, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to follow these steps:

Install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit on the host machine that runs Docker. This toolkit includes the NVIDIA Container Runtime, which is a modified version of the Docker runtime that supports GPU hardware.

Use the base image provided by NVIDIA as the first line of the Dockerfile. The base image contains the NVIDIA drivers and CUDA toolkit that are required for GPU-accelerated applications. The base image can be specified as FROM nvcr.io/nvidia/cuda:tag, where tag is the version of CUDA and the operating system.

Install the required dependencies and frameworks for the ResNet model, such as PyTorch, torchvision, etc., in the Dockerfile.

Copy the ResNet model code and any other necessary files to the Docker container in the Dockerfile.

Build the Docker image using the docker build command.

Push the Docker image to a repository, such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), using the docker push command.

Specify the Docker image URI and the instance type (ml.p3.xlarge) in the Amazon SageMaker CreateTrainingJob request body.

The other options are not valid or sufficient for building a Docker container that can leverage the NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon EC2 P3 instances. Bundling the NVIDIA drivers with the Docker image is not a good option, as it can cause driver conflicts and compatibility issues with the host machine and the NVIDIA GPUs. Organizing the Docker container’s file structure to execute on GPU instances is not a good option, as it does not ensure that the Docker container can access the NVIDIA GPUs and the CUDA toolkit. Setting the GPU flag in the Amazon SageMaker CreateTrainingJob request body is not a good option, as it does not apply to custom Docker containers, but only to built-in algorithms and frameworks that support GPU instances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

Residual Analysis in Regression - Statistics By Jim

How to Check Residual Plots for Regression Analysis - dummies

Histogram of Residuals - Statistics How To

To perform efficient exploratory data analysis (EDA) on a large dataset for anomaly detection, using the First K option in SageMaker Data Wrangler is an optimal choice. This option allows the data scientist to select the first K rows, limiting the data loaded into memory, which conserves compute resources.

Given that the First K option allows the data scientist to determine K based on domain knowledge, this approach provides a representative sample without requiring extensive compute resources. Other options like randomized sampling may not provide data samples that are as useful for initial analysis in a time-series or sequential dataset context.

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

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

The data scientist should use the area under the precision-recall curve and the true positive rate to optimize the model. These metrics are suitable for imbalanced classification problems, such as credit card fraud detection, where the positive class (fraudulent transactions) is much rarer than the negative class (non-fraudulent transactions).

The area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) is a measure of how well the model can identify the positive class among all the predicted positives. Precision is the fraction of predicted positives that are actually positive, and recall is the fraction of actual positives that are correctly predicted. A higher AUPRC means that the model can achieve a higher precision with a higher recall, which is desirable for fraud detection.

The true positive rate (TPR) is another name for recall. It is also known as sensitivity or hit rate. It measures the proportion of actual positives that are correctly identified by the model. A higher TPR means that the model can capture more positives, which is the company’s goal.

References:

Metrics for Imbalanced Classification in Python - Machine Learning Mastery

Precision-Recall - scikit-learn

The MAPE of the predictor could be improved by making the following changes to the CreatePredictor API call:

Set PerformAutoML to true. This will allow Amazon Forecast to automatically evaluate different algorithms and choose the one that minimizes the objective function, which is the mean of the weighted losses over the forecast types. By default, these are the p10, p50, and p90 quantile losses1. This option can help find a better algorithm than DeepAR+ for the given data.

Set PerformHPO to true. This will enable hyperparameter optimization (HPO), which is the process of finding the optimal values for the algorithm-specific parameters that affect the quality of the forecasts. HPO can improve the accuracy of the predictor by tuning the hyperparameters based on the training data2.

The other options are not likely to improve the MAPE of the predictor. Setting ForecastHorizon to 4 will reduce the number of time steps that the model predicts, which may not match the business requirement of predicting next month’s inventory. Setting ForecastFrequency to W for weekly will change the granularity of the forecasts, which may not be appropriate for the monthly data. Setting FeaturizationMethodName to filling will not have any effect, since there is no missing data in the dataset.

References:

CreatePredictor - Amazon Forecast

HPOConfig - Amazon Forecast

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 …

 A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier is a suitable architecture for image classification tasks, as it can learn features from the images and reduce the dimensionality of the input. A linear output layer that outputs the probability that an image contains a car is appropriate for a binary classification problem, as it can produce a single scalar value between 0 and 1. A softmax output layer is more suitable for a multi-class classification problem, as it can produce a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1. A deep multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier is not as effective as a CNN for image classification, as it does not exploit the spatial structure of the images and requires a large number of parameters to process the high-dimensional input. References:

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS

AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS

 The data ingestion rate into Amazon S3 can be improved by increasing the number of shards for the data stream. A shard is the base throughput unit of a Kinesis data stream. One shard provides 1 MB/second data input and 2 MB/second data output. Increasing the number of shards increases the data ingestion capacity of the stream. This can help reduce the backlog of data for Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest.

References:

Shard - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Scaling Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with AWS CloudFormation - AWS Big Data Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

Data Transfer Service - AWS DataSync

Deploying a DataSync Agent

Creating a Task

Syncing Data with AWS DataSync

Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a metric that is best suited to score the model for the given scenario. AUC is a measure of the performance of a binary classifier, such as a model that predicts whether a credit card transaction is valid or fraudulent. AUC is calculated based on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, which is a plot that shows the trade-off between the true positive rate (TPR) and the false positive rate (FPR) of the classifier as the decision threshold is varied. The TPR, also known as recall or sensitivity, is the proportion of actual positive cases (fraudulent transactions) that are correctly predicted as positive by the classifier. The FPR, also known as the fall-out, is the proportion of actual negative cases (valid transactions) that are incorrectly predicted as positive by the classifier. The ROC curve illustrates how well the classifier can distinguish between the two classes, regardless of the class distribution or the error costs. A perfect classifier would have a TPR of 1 and an FPR of 0 for all thresholds, resulting in a ROC curve that goes from the bottom left to the top left and then to the top right of the plot. A random classifier would have a TPR and an FPR that are equal for all thresholds, resulting in a ROC curve that goes from the bottom left to the top right of the plot along the diagonal line. AUC is the area under the ROC curve, and it ranges from 0 to 1. A higher AUC indicates a better classifier, as it means that the classifier has a higher TPR and a lower FPR for all thresholds. AUC is a useful metric for imbalanced classification problems, such as the credit card transaction dataset, because it is insensitive to the class imbalance and the error costs. AUC can capture the overall performance of the classifier across all possible scenarios, and it can be used to compare different classifiers based on their ROC curves.

The other options are not as suitable as AUC for the given scenario for the following reasons:

Precision: Precision is the proportion of predicted positive cases (fraudulent transactions) that are actually positive. Precision is a useful metric when the cost of a false positive is high, such as in spam detection or medical diagnosis. However, precision is not a good metric for imbalanced classification problems, because it can be misleadingly high when the positive class is rare. For example, a classifier that predicts all transactions as valid would have a precision of 0, but a very high accuracy of 99%. Precision is also dependent on the decision threshold and the error costs, which may vary for different scenarios.

Recall: Recall is the same as the TPR, and it is the proportion of actual positive cases (fraudulent transactions) that are correctly predicted as positive by the classifier. Recall is a useful metric when the cost of a false negative is high, such as in fraud detection or cancer diagnosis. However, recall is not a good metric for imbalanced classification problems, because it can be misleadingly low when the positive class is rare. For example, a classifier that predicts all transactions as fraudulent would have a recall of 1, but a very low accuracy of 1%. Recall is also dependent on the decision threshold and the error costs, which may vary for different scenarios.

Root Mean Square Error (RMSE): RMSE is a metric that measures the average difference between the predicted and the actual values. RMSE is a useful metric for regression problems, where the goal is to predict a continuous value, such as the price of a house or the temperature of a city. However, RMSE is not a good metric for classification problems, where the goal is to predict a discrete value, such as the class label of a transaction. RMSE is not meaningful for classification problems, because it does not capture the accuracy or the error costs of the predictions.

References:

ROC Curve and AUC

How and When to Use ROC Curves and Precision-Recall Curves for Classification in Python

Precision-Recall

Root Mean Squared Error

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

How Amazon Forecast Works - Amazon Forecast

Choosing Datasets - Amazon Forecast

 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

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

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

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

Machine Learning- Prinicipal Component Analysis | i2tutorials

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

Monitor data and model quality - Amazon SageMaker

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

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

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

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

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

The other options are not necessary or appropriate for Word2Vec:

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

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

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

The solution A will create the required transformed records with the least operational overhead because it uses AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which are fully managed services that can provide the desired functionality. The solution A involves the following steps:

Create an AWS Lambda function that can transform the incoming records. AWS Lambda is a service that can run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda can execute the transformation logic on the purchasing records and add the new attributes to the records1.

Enable data transformation on the ingestion Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream. Use the Lambda function as the invocation target. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service that can capture, transform, and load streaming data into AWS data stores. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can enable data transformation and invoke the Lambda function to process the incoming records before delivering them to Amazon S3. This can reduce the operational overhead of managing the transformation process and the data storage2.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option B: Deploying an Amazon EMR cluster that runs Apache Spark and includes the transformation logic, using Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) to schedule an AWS Lambda function to launch the cluster each day and transform the records that accumulate in Amazon S3, and delivering the transformed records to Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The company will have to manage the Amazon EMR cluster, the Apache Spark application, the AWS Lambda function, and the Amazon EventBridge rule. Moreover, this solution will introduce a delay in the transformation process, as it will run only once a day3.

Option C: Deploying an Amazon S3 File Gateway in the stores, updating the in-store software to deliver data to the S3 File Gateway, and using a scheduled daily AWS Glue job to transform the data that the S3 File Gateway delivers to Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The company will have to manage the S3 File Gateway, the in-store software, and the AWS Glue job. Moreover, this solution will introduce a delay in the transformation process, as it will run only once a day4.

Option D: Launching a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that include the transformation logic, configuring the EC2 instances with a daily cron job to transform the records that accumulate in Amazon S3, and delivering the transformed records to Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The company will have to manage the EC2 instances, the transformation code, and the cron job. Moreover, this solution will introduce a delay in the transformation process, as it will run only once a day5.

References:

1: AWS Lambda

2: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

3: Amazon EMR

4: Amazon S3 File Gateway

5: Amazon EC2

Updating the existing SageMaker endpoint to use a new configuration that is weighted to send 5% of the traffic to the new variant is the simplest approach with the least risk to deploy the model and roll it back, if needed. This is because SageMaker supports A/B testing, which allows the Specialist to compare the performance of different model variants by sending a portion of the traffic to each variant. The Specialist can monitor the metrics of each variant and adjust the weights accordingly. If the new variant does not perform as expected, the Specialist can revert traffic to the last version by resetting the weights to 100% for the old variant and 0% for the new variant. This way, the Specialist can deploy the model without affecting the customer experience and roll it back easily if needed. References:

Amazon SageMaker

Deploying models to Amazon SageMaker hosting services

The solution that the agency should consider is to use a proxy server at each local office and for each camera, and stream the RTSP feed to a unique Amazon Kinesis Video Streams video stream. On each stream, use Amazon Rekognition Video and create a stream processor to detect faces from a collection of known employees, and alert when non-employees are detected.

This solution has the following advantages:

It can handle thousands of video cameras in real time, as Amazon Kinesis Video Streams can scale elastically to support any number of producers and consumers1.

It can leverage the Amazon Rekognition Video API, which is designed and optimized for video analysis, and can detect faces in challenging conditions such as low lighting, occlusions, and different poses2.

It can use a stream processor, which is a feature of Amazon Rekognition Video that allows you to create a persistent application that analyzes streaming video and stores the results in a Kinesis data stream3. The stream processor can compare the detected faces with a collection of known employees, which is a container for persisting faces that you want to search for in the input video stream4. The stream processor can also send notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) when non-employees are detected, which can trigger downstream actions such as sending alerts or storing the events in Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES)3.

References:

1: What Is Amazon Kinesis Video Streams? - Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

2: Detecting and Analyzing Faces - Amazon Rekognition

3: Using Amazon Rekognition Video Stream Processor - Amazon Rekognition

4: Working with Stored Faces - Amazon Rekognition

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

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

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

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

References:

Amazon Augmented AI

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth

Amazon Textract Operations

Amazon Rekognition