Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Practice Test

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

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

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

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

References:

• 1: Using Pipe input mode for Amazon SageMaker algorithms | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• 2: Image Classification Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

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

• Use a one-hot encoder for the categorical fields in the dataset. This will create binary features for each category and avoid imposing an ordinal relationship among them. This can help the model learn the patterns better and generalize to unseen data.
• Perform standardization on the financial fields in the dataset. This will scale the features to have zero mean and unit variance, which can improve the convergence and performance of the model. This can also help the model handle features with different units and ranges.
• Apply L1 regularization to the data. This will add a penalty term to the loss function that is proportional to the absolute value of the coefficients. This can help the model reduce the complexity and select the most relevant features by shrinking the coefficients of less important features to zero.

References:

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

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

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

• Configure the endpoint to use Amazon Elastic Inference (EI) accelerators. This will enable the company to reduce the cost and latency of running TensorFlow inference on SageMaker. Amazon EI provides GPU-powered acceleration for deep learning models without requiring the use of GPU instances. Amazon EI can attach to any SageMaker instance type and provide the right amount of acceleration based on the workload1.
• Configure the endpoint to automatically scale with the Invocations Per Instance metric. This will enable the company to adjust the number of instances based on the demand and traffic patterns of the website. The Invocations Per Instance metric measures the average number of requests that each instance processes over a period of time. By using this metric, the company can scale out the endpoint when the load increases and scale in when the load decreases. This can improve the response time and availability of the product recommendation engine2.

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option B: Creating a new endpoint configuration with two production variants will not solve the issue of increasing response time and errors. Production variants are used to split the traffic between different models or versions of the same model. They can be useful for testing, updating, or A/B testing models. However, they do not provide any scaling or acceleration benefits for the inference workload3.
• Option D: Deploying a second instance pool to support a blue/green deployment of models will not solve the issue of increasing response time and errors. Blue/green deployment is a technique for updating models without downtime or disruption. It involves creating a new endpoint configuration with a different instance pool and model version, and then shifting the traffic from the old endpoint to the new endpoint gradually. However, this technique does not provide any scaling or acceleration benefits for the inference workload4.
• Option E: Reconfiguring the endpoint to use burstable instances will not solve the issue of increasing response time and errors. Burstable instances are instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline when needed. They can be useful for workloads that have moderate CPU utilization and occasional spikes. However, they are not suitable for workloads that have high and consistent CPU utilization, such as the product recommendation engine. Moreover, burstable instances may incur additional charges when they exceed their CPU credits5.

References:

• 1: Amazon Elastic Inference
• 2: How to Scale Amazon SageMaker Endpoints
• 3: Deploying Models to Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services
• 4: Updating Models in Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services
• 5: Burstable Performance Instances

 The 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

AWS Glue jobs is the AWS service or feature that will meet the requirements with the least development effort over time. AWS Glue jobs is a fully managed service that enables data engineers to run Apache Spark applications on a serverless Spark environment. AWS Glue jobs can perform batch preprocessing data transformations on large datasets stored in Amazon S3, such as converting data formats, filtering data, joining data, and aggregating data. AWS Glue jobs can also scale the Spark environment automatically based on the data volume and processing needs, without requiring any infrastructure provisioning or management. AWS Glue jobs can reduce the development effort and time by providing a graphical interface to create and monitor Spark applications, as well as a code generation feature that can generate Scala or Python code based on the data sources and targets. AWS Glue jobs can also integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker, to enable further data analysis and machine learning tasks1.

The other options are either more complex or less scalable than AWS Glue jobs. Amazon EMR cluster is a managed service that enables data engineers to run Apache Spark applications on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. However, Amazon EMR cluster requires more development effort and time than AWS Glue jobs, as it involves setting up, configuring, and managing the cluster, as well as writing and deploying the Spark code. Amazon EMR cluster also does not scale automatically, but requires manual or scheduled resizing of the cluster based on the data volume and processing needs2. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables data engineers to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. However, Amazon Athena is not suitable for performing complex data transformations, such as joining data from multiple sources, aggregating data, or applying custom logic. Amazon Athena is also not designed for running Spark applications, but only supports SQL queries3. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that enables data engineers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. However, AWS Lambda is not optimized for running Spark applications, as it has limitations on the execution time, memory size, and concurrency of the functions. AWS Lambda is also not integrated with Amazon S3, and requires additional steps to read and write data from S3 buckets.

References:

• 1: AWS Glue - Fully Managed ETL Service - Amazon Web Services
• 2: Amazon EMR - Amazon Web Services
• 3: Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3
• [4]: AWS Lambda – Serverless Compute - Amazon Web Services

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

 The best combination of AWS services to meet the requirements of data discovery, enrichment, transformation, querying, analysis, and reporting with the least coding and infrastructure management is AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight. These services are:

• AWS Glue for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that automatically crawls, catalogs, and prepares data from various sources and formats. It also provides a visual interface called AWS Glue DataBrew that allows users to apply over 250 transformations to clean, normalize, and enrich data without writing code1
• Amazon Athena for querying and analyzing the results in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that allows users to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It supports a variety of data formats, such as CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet, and Avro. It also integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog to provide a unified view of the data sources and schemas2
• Amazon QuickSight for reporting and getting insights. Amazon QuickSight is a serverless business intelligence service that allows users to create and share interactive dashboards and reports. It also provides ML-powered features, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and natural language queries, to help users discover hidden insights from their data3

The other options are not suitable because they either require more coding effort, more infrastructure management, or do not support the desired use cases. For example:

• Option A uses Amazon EMR for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation. Amazon EMR is a managed cluster platform that runs Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and other open-source frameworks for big data processing. It requires users to write code in languages such as Python, Scala, or SQL to perform data integration tasks. It also requires users to provision, configure, and scale the clusters according to their needs4
• Option B uses Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for data ingestion. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a service that allows users to process streaming data in real time using SQL or Apache Flink. It is not suitable for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation, which are typically batch-oriented tasks. It also requires users to write code to define the data processing logic and the output destination5
• Option D uses AWS Data Pipeline for data transfer and AWS Step Functions for orchestrating AWS Lambda jobs for data discovery, enrichment, and transformation. AWS Data Pipeline is a service that helps users move data between AWS services and on-premises data sources. AWS Step Functions is a service that helps users coordinate multiple AWS services into workflows. AWS Lambda is a service that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. These services require users to write code to define the data sources, destinations, transformations, and workflows. They also require users to manage the scalability, performance, and reliability of the data pipelines.

References:

• 1: AWS Glue - Data Integration Service - Amazon Web Services
• 2: Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Query Service - AWS
• 3: Amazon QuickSight - Business Intelligence Service - AWS
• 4: Amazon EMR - Amazon Web Services
• 5: Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics - Amazon Web Services
• : AWS Data Pipeline - Amazon Web Services
• : AWS Step Functions - Amazon Web Services
• : AWS Lambda - Amazon Web Services

 The best way to address the overfitting problem in image classification is to increase the dropout rate at the flatten layer because the model is not generalized enough. Dropout is a regularization technique that randomly drops out some units from the neural network during training, reducing the co-adaptation of features and preventing overfitting. The flatten layer is the layer that converts the output of the convolutional layers into a one-dimensional vector that can be fed into the dense layers. Increasing the dropout rate at the flatten layer means that more features from the convolutional layers will be ignored, forcing the model to learn more robust and generalizable representations from the remaining features.

The other options are not correct for this scenario because:

• Increasing the learning rate would not help with the overfitting problem, as it would make the optimization process more unstable and prone to overshooting the global minimum. A high learning rate can also cause the model to diverge or oscillate around the optimal solution, resulting in poor performance and accuracy.
• Increasing the dimensionality of the dense layer next to the flatten layer would not help with the overfitting problem, as it would make the model more complex and increase the number of parameters to be learned. A more complex model can fit the training data better, but it can also memorize the noise and irrelevant details in the data, leading to overfitting and poor generalization.
• Increasing the epoch number would not help with the overfitting problem, as it would make the model train longer and more likely to overfit the training data. A high epoch number can cause the model to converge to the global minimum, but it can also cause the model to over-optimize the training data and lose the ability to generalize to new data.

References:

• Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting
• How to Reduce Overfitting With Dropout Regularization in Keras
• How to Control the Stability of Training Neural Networks With the Learning Rate
• How to Choose the Number of Hidden Layers and Nodes in a Feedforward Neural Network?
• How to decide the optimal number of epochs to train a neural network?

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

• Naive Bayes and Text Classification I
• Bayesian Networks

• 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.

The best solution for text extraction and entity detection with the least amount of effort is to use Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend. These services are:

• Amazon Textract for text extraction from receipt images. Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that can automatically extract text and data from scanned documents. It can handle different structures and formats of documents, such as PDF, TIFF, PNG, and JPEG, without any preprocessing steps. It can also extract key-value pairs and tables from documents1
• Amazon Comprehend for entity detection and custom entity detection. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that can identify entities, such as dates, locations, and notes, from unstructured text. It can also detect custom entities, such as receipt numbers, by using a custom entity recognizer that can be trained with a small amount of labeled data2

The other options are not suitable because they either require more effort for text extraction, entity detection, or custom entity detection. For example:

• Option A uses the Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm to train on the text for entities and custom entities. BlazingText is a supervised learning algorithm that can perform text classification and word2vec. It requires users to provide a large amount of labeled data, preprocess the data into a specific format, and tune the hyperparameters of the model3
• Option B uses a deep learning OCR model from the AWS Marketplace and a NER deep learning model for text extraction and entity detection. These models are pre-trained and may not be suitable for the specific use case of receipt processing. They also require users to deploy and manage the models on Amazon SageMaker or Amazon EC2 instances4
• Option D uses a deep learning OCR model from the AWS Marketplace for text extraction. This model has the same drawbacks as option B. It also requires users to integrate the model output with Amazon Comprehend for entity detection and custom entity detection.

References:

• 1: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from documents
• 2: Amazon Comprehend – Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML)
• 3: BlazingText - Amazon SageMaker
• 4: AWS Marketplace: OCR

 In this scenario, the specialist should use one-hot encoding and RGB encoding to allow the regression model to learn from the Wall_Color data. One-hot encoding is a technique used to convert categorical data into numerical data. It creates new columns that store one-hot representation of colors. For example, a variable named color has three categories: red, green, and blue. After one-hot encoding, the new variables should be like this:

One-hot encoding can capture the presence or absence of a color, but it cannot capture the intensity or hue of a color. RGB encoding is a technique used to represent colors in a digital image. It creates three columns to encode the color in RGB format. For example, a variable named color has three categories: red, green, and blue. After RGB encoding, the new variables should be like this:

RGB encoding can capture the intensity and hue of a color, but it may also introduce correlation among the three columns. Therefore, using both one-hot encoding and RGB encoding can provide more information to the regression model than using either one alone.

References:

• Feature Engineering for Categorical Data
• How to Perform Feature Selection with Categorical Data

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

References:

• 1: AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide
• 2: AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS
• 3: AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS
• 4: Precision and recall

• The 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:

References:

• Regularization for Logistic Regression
• Recursive Feature Elimination

 A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a type of machine learning algorithm that is suitable for image classification tasks. A CNN consists of multiple layers that can extract features from images and learn to recognize patterns and objects. A CNN can also use transfer learning to leverage pre-trained models that have been trained on large-scale image datasets, such as ImageNet, and fine-tune them for specific tasks, such as detecting the company’s retail brand. A CNN can achieve high accuracy and performance for image classification problems, as it can handle complex and diverse images and reduce the dimensionality and noise of the input data. A CNN can be implemented using various frameworks and libraries, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, MXNet, etc12

The other options are not valid or relevant for the image classification task. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a type of machine learning algorithm that is suitable for topic modeling tasks. LDA can discover the hidden topics and their proportions in a collection of text documents, such as news articles, tweets, reviews, etc. LDA is not applicable for image data, as it requires textual input and output. LDA can be implemented using various frameworks and libraries, such as Gensim, Scikit-learn, Mallet, etc34

Recurrent neural network (RNN) is a type of machine learning algorithm that is suitable for sequential data tasks. RNN can process and generate data that has temporal or sequential dependencies, such as natural language, speech, audio, video, etc. RNN is not optimal for image data, as it does not capture the spatial features and relationships of the pixels. RNN can be implemented using various frameworks and libraries, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, MXNet, etc.

K-means is a type of machine learning algorithm that is suitable for clustering tasks. K-means can partition a set of data points into a predefined number of clusters, based on the similarity and distance between the data points. K-means is not suitable for image classification tasks, as it does not learn to label the images or detect the objects of interest. K-means can be implemented using various frameworks and libraries, such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.

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

One-hot encoding is a technique that can be used to convert a categorical variable, such as the Day-Of_Week column, to binary values. One-hot encoding creates a new binary column for each unique value in the original column, and assigns a value of 1 to the column that corresponds to the value in the original column, and 0 to the rest. For example, if the original column has values Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, one-hot encoding will create seven new columns, each representing one day of the week. If the value in the original column is Tuesday, then the column for Tuesday will have a value of 1, and the other columns will have a value of 0. One-hot encoding can help improve the performance of machine learning models, as it eliminates the ordinal relationship between the values and creates a more informative and sparse representation of the data.

References:

• One-Hot Encoding - Amazon SageMaker
• One-Hot Encoding: A Simple Guide for Beginners | by Jana Schmidt …
• One-Hot Encoding in Machine Learning | by Nishant Malik | Towards …

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

 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

The SageMaker Variant Invocations Per Instance setting is the target value for the average number of invocations per instance per minute for the model variant. It is used by the automatic scaling policy to add or remove instances to keep the metric close to the specified value. To determine this value, the following equation can be used in combination with load testing:

SageMakerVariantInvocationsPerInstance = (MAX_RPS * SAFETY_FACTOR) * 60

Where MAX_RPS is the maximum requests per second that the model variant can handle without service degradation, SAFETY_FACTOR is a factor that ensures that the clients do not exceed the maximum RPS, and 60 is the conversion factor from seconds to minutes. In this case, the given parameters are:

MAX_RPS = 20 SAFETY_FACTOR = 0.5

Plugging these values into the equation, we get:

SageMakerVariantInvocationsPerInstance = (20 * 0.5) * 60 SageMakerVariantInvocationsPerInstance = 600

Therefore, the Specialist should set the SageMaker Variant Invocations Per Instance setting to 600.

References:

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

• Object Detection: A computer vision technique that identifies and locates objects within an image or video.
• Pose Estimation: A computer vision technique that estimates the pose of a person by detecting the position and orientation of key body parts.
• Amazon SageMaker: A fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly.

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

References:

• XGBoost Parameters
• XGBoost for Imbalanced Classification

The best way to retrain the model to meet the requirements is to set the target_recall hyperparameter to 90% and set the binary_classifier_model_selection_criteria hyperparameter to recall_at_target_precision. This will instruct the linear learner algorithm to optimize the model for a high recall score, while maintaining a reasonable precision score. Recall is the proportion of actual positives that were identified correctly, which is important for the company’s goal of reaching at least 90% of the customers who are likely to buy the new product1. Precision is the proportion of positive identifications that were actually correct, which is also relevant for the company’s budget and efficiency2. By setting the target_recall to 90%, the algorithm will try to achieve a recall score of at least 90%, and by setting the binary_classifier_model_selection_criteria to recall_at_target_precision, the algorithm will select the model that has the highest recall score among those that have a precision score equal to or higher than the target precision3. The target precision is automatically set to the median of the precision scores of all the models trained in parallel4.

The other options are not correct or optimal, because they have the following drawbacks:

• B: Setting the target_precision hyperparameter to 90% and setting the binary_classifier_model_selection_criteria hyperparameter to precision_at_target_recall will optimize the model for a high precision score, while maintaining a reasonable recall score. However, this is not aligned with the company’s goal of reaching at least 90% of the customers who are likely to buy the new product, as precision does not reflect how well the model identifies the actual positives1. Moreover, setting the target_precision to 90% might be too high and unrealistic for the dataset, as the current precision score is only 75%4.
• C: Using 90% of the historical data for training and setting the number of epochs to 20 will not necessarily improve the recall score of the model, as it does not change the optimization objective or the model selection criteria. Moreover, using more data for training might reduce the amount of data available for validation, which is needed for selecting the best model among the ones trained in parallel3. The number of epochs is also not a decisive factor for the recall score, as it depends on the learning rate, the optimizer, and the convergence of the algorithm5.
• D: Setting the normalize_label hyperparameter to true and setting the number of classes to 2 will not affect the recall score of the model, as these are irrelevant hyperparameters for binary classification problems. The normalize_label hyperparameter is only applicable for regression problems, as it controls whether the label is normalized to have zero mean and unit variance3. The number of classes hyperparameter is only applicable for multiclass classification problems, as it specifies the number of output classes3.

References:

• 1: Classification: Precision and Recall | Machine Learning | Google for Developers
• 2: Precision and recall - Wikipedia
• 3: Linear Learner Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker
• 4: How linear learner works - Amazon SageMaker
• 5: Getting hands-on with Amazon SageMaker Linear Learner - Pluralsight

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

• Build a custom model in Amazon SageMaker to recognize the number of people in an image. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides tools and workflows for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. A custom model can be tailored to the specific use case of line-counting and achieve higher accuracy than a generic model1
• Deploy AWS DeepLens cameras in the restaurant to capture video. AWS DeepLens is a wireless video camera that integrates with Amazon SageMaker and AWS Lambda. It can run machine learning inference locally on the device without requiring internet connectivity or streaming video to the cloud. This reduces the bandwidth consumption and latency of the application2
• Deploy the model to the cameras. AWS DeepLens allows users to deploy trained models from Amazon SageMaker to the cameras with a few clicks. The cameras can then use the model to process the video frames and count the number of people in each frame2
• Deploy an AWS Lambda function to the cameras to use the model to count people and send an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification if the line is too long. AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS DeepLens supports running Lambda functions on the device to perform actions based on the inference results. Amazon SNS is a service that enables users to send notifications to subscribers via email, SMS, or mobile push23

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

• Option A uses Amazon Kinesis Video Streams to stream the data to AWS over the restaurant’s existing internet connection. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is a service that enables users to capture, process, and store video streams for analytics and machine learning. However, this option requires streaming multiple video streams to the cloud, which may consume a lot of bandwidth and cause network congestion. It also requires internet connectivity, which may not be reliable or available in some locations4
• Option B uses Amazon Rekognition on the AWS DeepLens device. Amazon Rekognition is a service that provides computer vision capabilities, such as face detection, face recognition, and object detection. However, this option requires calling the Amazon Rekognition API over the internet, which may introduce latency and require bandwidth. It also uses a generic face detection model, which may not be optimized for the line-counting use case.
• Option C uses Amazon SageMaker to build a custom model and an Amazon SageMaker endpoint to call the model. Amazon SageMaker endpoints are hosted web services that allow users to perform inference on their models. However, this option requires sending the images to the endpoint over the internet, which may consume bandwidth and introduce latency. It also requires internet connectivity, which may not be reliable or available in some locations.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker – Machine Learning Service - AWS
• 2: AWS DeepLens - Deep learning enabled video camera - AWS
• 3: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) - AWS
• 4: Amazon Kinesis Video Streams - Amazon Web Services
• : Amazon Rekognition – Video and Image - AWS
• : Deploy a Model - Amazon SageMaker

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

The solution D meets the requirements with the least operational overhead because it uses Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, which is a fully managed service that automates the end-to-end process of building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Autopilot can handle data preprocessing, feature engineering, algorithm selection, hyperparameter tuning, and model deployment. The company only needs to create an IAM role for Amazon SageMaker with access to the S3 bucket, create a SageMaker AutoML job pointing to the bucket with the dataset, specify the price as the target attribute, and wait for the job to complete. Amazon SageMaker Autopilot will generate a list of candidate models with different configurations and performance metrics, and the company can deploy the best model for predictions1.

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option A: Creating a service-linked role for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with access to the S3 bucket, creating an ECS cluster based on an AWS Deep Learning Containers image, writing the code to perform the feature engineering, training a logistic regression model for predicting the price, and performing the inferences will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The company will have to manage the ECS cluster, the container image, the code, the model, and the inference endpoint. Moreover, logistic regression may not be the best algorithm for predicting the price, as it is more suitable for binary classification tasks2.
• Option B: Creating an Amazon SageMaker notebook with a new IAM role that is associated with the notebook, pulling the dataset from the S3 bucket, exploring different combinations of feature engineering transformations, regression algorithms, and hyperparameters, comparing all the results in the notebook, and deploying the most accurate configuration in an endpoint for predictions will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The company will have to write the code for the feature engineering, the model training, the model evaluation, and the model deployment. The company will also have to manually compare the results and select the best configuration3.
• Option C: Creating an IAM role with access to Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Lambda, creating a training job with the SageMaker built-in XGBoost model pointing to the bucket with the dataset, specifying the price as the target feature, loading the model artifact to a Lambda function for inference on prices of new houses will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Autopilot. The company will have to create and manage the Lambda function, the model artifact, and the inference endpoint. Moreover, XGBoost may not be the best algorithm for predicting the price, as it is more suitable for classification and ranking tasks4.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Autopilot
• 2: Amazon Elastic Container Service
• 3: Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instances
• 4: Amazon SageMaker XGBoost Algorithm

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

References:

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Deep Learning with Amazon SageMaker
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Class Imbalance and Weighted Loss Functions

 The 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.

The best way to ensure that required packages are automatically available on the notebook instance for the data scientist to use is to create an Amazon SageMaker lifecycle configuration with package installation commands and assign the lifecycle configuration to the notebook instance. A lifecycle configuration is a shell script that runs when you create or start a notebook instance. You can use a lifecycle configuration to customize the notebook instance by installing libraries, changing environment variables, or downloading datasets. You can also use a lifecycle configuration to automate the installation of custom Python packages that are not natively available on Amazon SageMaker.

Option A is incorrect because installing AWS Systems Manager Agent on the underlying Amazon EC2 instance and using Systems Manager Automation to execute the package installation commands is not a recommended way to customize the notebook instance. Systems Manager Automation is a feature that lets you safely automate common and repetitive IT operations and tasks across AWS resources. However, using Systems Manager Automation would require additional permissions and configurations, and it would not guarantee that the packages are installed before the notebook instance is ready to use.

Option B is incorrect because creating a Jupyter notebook file (.ipynb) with cells containing the package installation commands to execute and placing the file under the /etc/init directory of each Amazon SageMaker notebook instance is not a valid way to customize the notebook instance. The /etc/init directory is used to store scripts that are executed during the boot process of the operating system, not the Jupyter notebook application. Moreover, a Jupyter notebook file is not a shell script that can be executed by the operating system.

Option C is incorrect because using the conda package manager from within the Jupyter notebook console to apply the necessary conda packages to the default kernel of the notebook is not an automatic way to customize the notebook instance. This option would require the data scientist to manually run the conda commands every time they create or start a new notebook instance. This would not be efficient or convenient for the data scientist.

References:

• Customize a notebook instance using a lifecycle configuration script - Amazon SageMaker
• AWS Systems Manager Automation - AWS Systems Manager
• Conda environments - Amazon SageMaker

• Option C is correct because augmenting the images in the dataset can help the model learn more features and generalize better to new products. Image augmentation is a common technique to increase the diversity and size of the training data.
• Option E is correct because Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can train a custom model to detect specific objects and scenes that are relevant to the business use case. It can also leverage the existing models from Amazon Rekognition that are trained on tens of millions of images across many categories.
• Option F is correct because class imbalance can affect the performance and accuracy of the model, as it can cause the model to be biased towards the majority class and ignore the minority class. Applying oversampling or undersampling can help balance the classes and improve the model’s ability to learn from the data.
• Option A is incorrect because the semantic segmentation algorithm is used to assign a label to every pixel in an image, not to classify the whole image into a category. Semantic segmentation is useful for applications such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and satellite imagery analysis.
• Option B is incorrect because the DetectLabels API is a general-purpose image analysis service that can detect objects, scenes, and concepts in an image, but it cannot be customized to the specific product lines of the ecommerce company. The DetectLabels API is based on the pre-trained models from Amazon Rekognition, which may not cover all the categories that the company needs.
• Option D is incorrect because normalizing the pixels and scaling the images are preprocessing steps that should be done before training the model, not after. These steps can help improve the model’s convergence and performance, but they are not sufficient to increase the accuracy of the model on new products.

References:

• : Image Augmentation - Amazon SageMaker
• : Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels Features
• : [Handling Imbalanced Datasets in Machine Learning]
• : [Semantic Segmentation - Amazon SageMaker]
• : [DetectLabels - Amazon Rekognition]
• : [Image Classification - MXNet - Amazon SageMaker]
• : [https://towardsdatascience.com/handling-imbalanced-datasets-in-machine-learning-7a0e84220f28]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/semantic-segmentation.html]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/API_DetectLabels.html]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/image-classification.html]
• : [https://towardsdatascience.com/handling-imbalanced-datasets-in-machine-learning-7a0e84220f28]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/semantic-segmentation.html]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/API_DetectLabels.html]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/image-classification.html]
• : [https://towardsdatascience.com/handling-imbalanced-datasets-in-machine-learning-7a0e84220f28]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/semantic-segmentation.html]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/API_DetectLabels.html]
• : [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/image-classification.html]

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

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

References:

• Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines integration
• Create a pipeline using a JSON specification
• Ingest data into a feature group

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

References:

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

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

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

References:

• Bias Detection and Model Explainability - Amazon SageMaker Clarify - AWS
• Amazon SageMaker Clarify Model Explainability
• Amazon SageMaker Clarify: Machine Learning Bias Detection and Explainability
• GitHub - aws/amazon-sagemaker-clarify: Fairness Aware Machine Learning

The best storage option for the trucking company is to use an Amazon S3-backed data lake to store the raw images, and set up the permissions using bucket policies. A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. Amazon S3 is the ideal choice for building a data lake because it offers high durability, scalability, availability, and security. You can store any type of data in Amazon S3, such as images, videos, audio, text, etc. You can also use AWS services such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon EMR to analyze and process the data in the data lake. To ensure the data is only accessible to specific IAM users, you can use bucket policies to grant or deny access to the S3 buckets based on the IAM user’s identity or role. Bucket policies are JSON documents that specify the permissions for the bucket and the objects in it. You can use conditions to restrict access based on various factors, such as IP address, time, source, etc. By using bucket policies, you can control who can access the data in the data lake and what actions they can perform on it.

References:

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Build a Data Lake Foundation with Amazon S3
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Using Bucket Policies and User Policies

 To find the most discussed topics in the comments that are in either English or Spanish, the machine learning specialist needs to perform two steps: first, translate the comments from Spanish to English if necessary, and second, apply a topic modeling algorithm to the comments. The following options are valid ways to accomplish these steps using AWS services:

• Option C: Use Amazon Translate to translate from Spanish to English, if necessary. Use Amazon Comprehend topic modeling to find the topics. Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. Amazon Comprehend topic modeling is a feature that automatically organizes a collection of text documents into topics that contain commonly used words and phrases.
• Option E: Use Amazon Translate to translate from Spanish to English, if necessary. Use Amazon SageMaker Neural Topic Model (NTM) to find the topics. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. Amazon SageMaker Neural Topic Model (NTM) is an unsupervised learning algorithm that is used to organize a corpus of documents into topics that contain word groupings based on their statistical distribution.

The other options are not valid because:

• Option A: Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm is not a topic modeling algorithm, but a text classification and word embedding algorithm. It cannot find the topics independently from language, as different languages have different word distributions and semantics.
• Option B: Amazon SageMaker seq2seq algorithm is not a translation algorithm, but a sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm that can be used for tasks such as summarization, chatbot, and question answering. Amazon SageMaker Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm is a topic modeling algorithm, but it requires the input documents to be in the same language and preprocessed into a bag-of-words format.
• Option D: Amazon Lex is not a topic modeling algorithm, but a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. It cannot extract topics from the content, but only intents and slots based on a predefined bot configuration. References:
• Amazon Translate
• Amazon Comprehend
• Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon SageMaker Neural Topic Model (NTM) Algorithm
• Amazon SageMaker BlazingText
• Amazon SageMaker Seq2Seq
• Amazon SageMaker Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Algorithm
• Amazon Lex

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

 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

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

• Data processing options for AI/ML | AWS Machine Learning Blog
• Data preprocessing - Machine Learning Lens
• How to Normalize Data Using scikit-learn in Python
• Normalization | Machine Learning | Google for Developers

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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?

The problem that the Machine Learning Specialist is facing is likely due to concept drift, which is a phenomenon where the statistical properties of the target variable change over time, making the model less accurate and relevant. Concept drift can occur due to various reasons, such as changes in customer preferences, market trends, product inventory, seasonality, etc. In this case, the product recommendations model may have become outdated as the product inventory changed over time, making the recommendations less appealing to the customers. To address this issue, the model should be periodically retrained using the original training data plus new data as product inventory changes. This way, the model can learn from the latest data and adapt to the changing customer behavior and preferences. Retraining the model from scratch using the original data while adding a regularization term may not be sufficient, as it does not account for the new data. Updating the model’s hyperparameters may not help either, as it does not address the underlying data distribution change. Re-engineering the model completely may not be necessary, as the model may still be valid and useful with periodic retraining.

References:

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

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

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

 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

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

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – Amazon Web Services

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

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

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

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

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler documentation
• 2: Amazon EMR Serverless documentation
• 3: AWS Glue DataBrew documentation
• 4: Pandas documentation

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

The other options are not correct because:

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

References:

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

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

References:

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

The 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 …

Image classification is a machine learning task that involves assigning labels to images based on their content. Image classification can be performed using various algorithms, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are a type of deep learning model that can learn to extract high-level features from images. To train a customized image classification model, the e-commerce company needs a compute choice that can support the high computational demands of deep learning and provide good accuracy on the model quickly. A GPU accelerated computing instance, such as p3.2xlarge, is a suitable choice for this task, as it can leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs to speed up the training process and reduce the training time. A p3.2xlarge instance has one NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU, which can provide up to 125 teraflops of mixed-precision performance and 16 GB of GPU memory. A p3.2xlarge instance can also use various deep learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, etc., to build and train the image classification model. A p3.2xlarge instance is also more cost-effective than a p3.8xlarge instance, which has four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, as the latter may not be necessary for a proof of concept with a small dataset. Therefore, the Machine Learning Specialist should select p3.2xlarge as the compute choice to train and achieve good accuracy on the model quickly.

References:

• Amazon EC2 P3 Instances - Amazon Web Services
• Image Classification - Amazon SageMaker
• Convolutional Neural Networks - Amazon SageMaker
• Deep Learning AMIs - Amazon Web Services

A residual plot is a type of plot that displays the values of a predictor variable in a regression model along the x-axis and the values of the residuals along the y-axis. This plot is used to assess whether or not the residuals in a regression model are normally distributed and whether or not they exhibit heteroscedasticity. Heteroscedasticity means that the variance of the residuals is not constant across different values of the predictor variable. This violates one of the assumptions of linear regression and can lead to biased estimates and unreliable predictions. The displayed residual plot shows a clear pattern of heteroscedasticity, as the residuals spread out as the fitted values increase. This indicates that linear regression is inappropriate for this data and a different model should be used. References:

• Regression - Amazon Machine Learning
• How to Create a Residual Plot by Hand
• How to Create a Residual Plot in Python

Linear regression is a machine learning approach that can be used to solve this problem. Linear regression is a supervised learning technique that can model the relationship between one or more input variables (features) and an output variable (target). In this case, the input variables could be the historical sales data of the part, such as the quarter, the demand, the price, the inventory, etc. The output variable could be the number of units to be produced for the part. Linear regression can learn the coefficients (weights) of the input variables that best fit the output variable, and then use them to make predictions for new data. Linear regression is suitable for problems that involve continuous and numeric output variables, such as predicting house prices, stock prices, or sales volumes. References:

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• Linear Regression

The problem described in the question is a case of underfitting, where the neural network model performs poorly on both the training and validation sets. This means that the model has not learned the features of the data well enough and has high bias. To solve this issue, the machine learning specialist should consider the following change:

• Add more data to the training set and retrain the model using transfer learning to reduce the bias: Adding more data to the training set can help the model learn more patterns and variations in the data and improve its performance. Transfer learning can also help the model leverage the knowledge from the pre-trained network and adapt it to the new data. This can reduce the bias and increase the accuracy of the model.

References:

• Transfer learning for TensorFlow image classification models in Amazon SageMaker
• Transfer learning for custom labels using a TensorFlow container and “bring your own algorithm” in Amazon SageMaker
• Machine Learning Concepts - AWS Training and Certification

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. It can analyze text documents and identify the key topics, entities, sentiments, languages, and more. In this case, Amazon Comprehend can be used with the transcribed files from Amazon Transcribe to extract the main topics that are being discussed by the call operators. This can help to understand the common issues and concerns of the customers, and provide insights for further analysis and improvement. References:

• Amazon Comprehend - Amazon Web Services
• AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Sample Questions

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

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

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

References:

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

The solution that will meet the requirements with the least development effort is to use Amazon SageMaker Feature Store to set feature groups for the current features that the ML models use, assign the required metadata for each feature, and use Amazon QuickSight to analyze the metadata. This solution can leverage the existing AWS services and features to perform feature-level metadata analysis and reporting.

Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a fully managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, search, and share machine learning (ML) features. The service provides feature management capabilities such as enabling easy feature reuse, low latency serving, time travel, and ensuring consistency between features used in training and inference workflows. A feature group is a logical grouping of ML features whose organization and structure is defined by a feature group schema. A feature group schema consists of a list of feature definitions, each of which specifies the name, type, and metadata of a feature. The metadata can include information such as data sensitivity, authorship, description, and parameters. The metadata can help make features discoverable, understandable, and traceable. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store allows users to set feature groups for the current features that the ML models use, and assign the required metadata for each feature using the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3), AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or Amazon SageMaker Studio1.

Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed, serverless business intelligence service that makes it easy to create and publish interactive dashboards that include ML insights. Amazon QuickSight can connect to various data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and analyze the data using standard SQL or built-in ML-powered analytics. Amazon QuickSight can also create rich visualizations and reports that can be accessed from any device, and securely shared with anyone inside or outside an organization. Amazon QuickSight can be used to analyze the metadata of the features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and generate a report that summarizes the metadata analysis2.

The other options are either more complex or less effective than the proposed solution. Using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler to select the features and create a data flow to perform feature-level metadata analysis would require additional steps and resources, and may not capture all the metadata attributes that the company requires. Creating an Amazon DynamoDB table to store feature-level metadata would introduce redundancy and inconsistency, as the metadata is already stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store. Using SageMaker Studio to analyze the metadata would not generate a report that can be easily shared and accessed by the company.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store – Amazon Web Services
• 2: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence Service - Amazon Web Services

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

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

 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

A hyperparameter tuning job is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that allows automatically finding the best combination of hyperparameters for a machine learning model. Hyperparameters are high-level parameters that influence the learning process and the performance of the model, such as the learning rate, the number of layers, the regularization factor, etc. A hyperparameter tuning job works by launching multiple training jobs with different hyperparameters, evaluating the results using an objective metric, and choosing the next set of hyperparameters to try based on a search strategy. The objective metric is a measure of the quality of the model, such as accuracy, precision, recall, etc. The search strategy is a method of exploring the hyperparameter space, such as random search, grid search, or Bayesian optimization.

Among the four options, option C is the most repeatable and requires the least amount of effort to use hyperparameter optimization to increase the model’s accuracy. This option involves the following steps:

• Create a hyperparameter tuning job: Amazon SageMaker provides an easy-to-use interface for creating a hyperparameter tuning job, either through the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. To create a hyperparameter tuning job, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to specify the following information:
• Set the accuracy as an objective metric: To use accuracy as an objective metric, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to ensure that the training algorithm writes the accuracy value to a file called metric_definitions in JSON format and prints it to stdout or stderr. For example, the file can contain the following content:

This means that the training algorithm prints a line like this:

• Amazon SageMaker reads the accuracy value from the line and uses it to evaluate and compare the training jobs.

The other options are not as repeatable and require more effort than option C for the following reasons:

• Option A: This option requires manually launching multiple training jobs in parallel with different hyperparameters, which can be tedious and error-prone. It also requires manually monitoring and comparing the results of the training jobs, which can be time-consuming and subjective.
• Option B: This option requires writing code to create an AWS Step Functions workflow that monitors the accuracy in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and relaunches the training job with a defined list of hyperparameters, which can be complex and challenging. It also requires maintaining and updating the list of hyperparameters, which can be inefficient and suboptimal.
• Option D: This option requires writing code to create a random walk in the parameter space to iterate through a range of values that should be used for each individual hyperparameter, which can be unreliable and unpredictable. It also requires defining and implementing a stopping criterion, which can be arbitrary and inconsistent.

References:

• Automatic Model Tuning - Amazon SageMaker
• Define Metrics to Monitor Model Performance

 The best way to securely access data stored in a specific Amazon S3 bucket from an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance is to attach a policy to the IAM role associated with the notebook that allows GetObject, PutObject, and ListBucket operations to the specific S3 bucket. This way, the notebook can use the AWS SDK or CLI to access the S3 bucket without exposing any credentials or requiring any additional configuration. This is also the recommended approach by AWS for granting access to S3 from SageMaker. References:

• Amazon SageMaker Roles
• Accessing Amazon S3 from a SageMaker Notebook Instance

 To deploy a model that was trained locally to Amazon SageMaker, the steps are:

• Build the Docker image with the inference code. The inference code should include the model loading, data preprocessing, prediction, and postprocessing logic. The Docker image should also include the dependencies and libraries required by the inference code and the model.
• Tag the Docker image with the registry hostname and upload it to Amazon ECR. Amazon ECR is a fully managed container registry that makes it easy to store, manage, and deploy container images. The registry hostname is the Amazon ECR registry URI for your account and Region. You can use the AWS CLI or the Amazon ECR console to tag and push the Docker image to Amazon ECR.
• Create a SageMaker model entity that points to the Docker image in Amazon ECR and the model artifacts in Amazon S3. The model entity is a logical representation of the model that contains the information needed to deploy the model for inference. The model artifacts are the files generated by the model training process, such as the model parameters and weights. You can use the AWS CLI, the SageMaker Python SDK, or the SageMaker console to create the model entity.
• Create an endpoint configuration that specifies the instance type and number of instances to use for hosting the model. The endpoint configuration also defines the production variants, which are the different versions of the model that you want to deploy. You can use the AWS CLI, the SageMaker Python SDK, or the SageMaker console to create the endpoint configuration.
• Create an endpoint that uses the endpoint configuration to deploy the model. The endpoint is a web service that exposes an HTTP API for inference requests. You can use the AWS CLI, the SageMaker Python SDK, or the SageMaker console to create the endpoint.

References:

• AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Deploy a Model on Amazon SageMaker
• AWS Machine Learning Training - Use Your Own Inference Code with Amazon SageMaker Hosting Services

A logarithmic transformation is a suitable data transformation for a linear regression model when the data has a skewed distribution, such as when the mode is lower than the median and the median is lower than the mean. A logarithmic transformation can reduce the skewness and make the data more symmetric and normally distributed, which are desirable properties for linear regression. A logarithmic transformation can also reduce the effect of outliers and heteroscedasticity (unequal variance) in the data. An exponential transformation would have the opposite effect of increasing the skewness and making the data more asymmetric. A polynomial transformation may not be able to capture the nonlinearity in the data and may introduce multicollinearity among the transformed variables. A sinusoidal transformation is not appropriate for data that does not have a periodic pattern.

References:

• Data Transformation - Scaler Topics
• Linear Regression - GeeksforGeeks
• Linear Regression - Scribbr

 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 meet the requirements is to use a principal component analysis (PCA) model, which is a technique that reduces the dimensionality of the dataset by transforming the original variables into a smaller set of new variables, called principal components, that capture most of the variance and information in the data1. This technique has the following advantages:

• It can increase the accuracy of the model by removing noise, redundancy, and multicollinearity from the data, and by enhancing the interpretability and generalization of the model23.
• It can decrease the processing time of the model by reducing the number of features and the computational complexity of the model, and by improving the convergence and stability of the model45.
• It is suitable for numeric variables, as it relies on the covariance or correlation matrix of the data, and it can handle a large quantity of variables, as it can extract the most relevant ones16.

The other options are not effective or appropriate, because they have the following drawbacks:

• A: Creating new features and interaction variables can increase the accuracy of the model by capturing more complex and nonlinear relationships in the data, but it can also increase the processing time of the model by adding more features and increasing the computational complexity of the model7. Moreover, it can introduce more noise, redundancy, and multicollinearity in the data, which can degrade the performance and interpretability of the model8.
• C: Applying normalization on the feature set can increase the accuracy of the model by scaling the features to a common range and avoiding the dominance of some features over others, but it can also decrease the processing time of the model by reducing the numerical instability and improving the convergence of the model . However, normalization alone is not enough to address the high dimensionality and high latency issues of the dataset, as it does not reduce the number of features or the variance in the data.
• D: Using a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) model is not suitable for numeric variables, as it is a technique that reduces the dimensionality of the dataset by transforming the original categorical variables into a smaller set of new variables, called factors, that capture most of the inertia and information in the data. MCA is similar to PCA, but it is designed for nominal or ordinal variables, not for continuous or interval variables.

References:

• 1: Principal Component Analysis - Amazon SageMaker
• 2: How to Use PCA for Data Visualization and Improved Performance in Machine Learning | by Pratik Shukla | Towards Data Science
• 3: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for Feature Selection and some of its Pitfalls | by Nagesh Singh Chauhan | Towards Data Science
• 4: How to Reduce Dimensionality with PCA and Train a Support Vector Machine in Python | by James Briggs | Towards Data Science
• 5: Dimensionality Reduction and Its Applications | by Aniruddha Bhandari | Towards Data Science
• 6: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in Python | by Susan Li | Towards Data Science
• 7: Feature Engineering for Machine Learning | by Dipanjan (DJ) Sarkar | Towards Data Science
• 8: Feature Engineering — How to Engineer Features and How to Get Good at It | by Parul Pandey | Towards Data Science
• : [Feature Scaling for Machine Learning: Understanding the Difference Between Normalization vs. Standardization | by Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D. | Towards Data Science]
• : [Why, How and When to Scale your Features | by George Seif | Towards Data Science]
• : [Normalization vs Dimensionality Reduction | by Saurabh Annadate | Towards Data Science]
• : [Multiple Correspondence Analysis - Amazon SageMaker]
• : [Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) | by Raul Eulogio | Towards Data Science]

 The best strategy to identify fraudulent accounts is to create a FindMatches machine learning transform in AWS Glue. The FindMatches transform enables you to identify duplicate or matching records in your dataset, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier and no fields match exactly. This can help you improve fraud detection by finding accounts that are associated with a previously known fraudulent user. You can teach the FindMatches transform your definition of a “duplicate” or a “match” through examples, and it will use machine learning to identify other potential duplicates or matches in your dataset. You can then use the FindMatches transform in your AWS Glue ETL jobs to cleanse your data.

Option A is incorrect because there is no built-in FindDuplicates Amazon Athena query. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. However, Amazon Athena does not provide a predefined query to find duplicate records in a dataset. You would have to write your own SQL query to perform this task, which might not be as effective or accurate as using the FindMatches transform.

Option C is incorrect because creating an AWS Glue crawler to infer duplicate accounts in the source data is not a valid strategy. An AWS Glue crawler is a program that connects to a data store, progresses through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for your data, and then creates metadata tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. A crawler does not perform any data cleansing or record matching tasks.

Option D is incorrect because searching for duplicate accounts in the AWS Glue Data Catalog is not a feasible strategy. The AWS Glue Data Catalog is a central repository to store structural and operational metadata for your data assets. The Data Catalog does not store the actual data, but rather the metadata that describes where the data is located, how it is formatted, and what it contains. Therefore, you cannot search for duplicate records in the Data Catalog.

References:

• Record matching with AWS Lake Formation FindMatches - AWS Glue
• Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3
• AWS Glue Crawlers - AWS Glue
• AWS Glue Data Catalog - AWS Glue

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

• Use Docker containers to build models - Amazon SageMaker
• Create a container with your own algorithms and models - Amazon SageMaker

Clustering is a machine learning technique that can group data points into clusters based on their similarity or proximity. Clustering can help discover the underlying structure and patterns in the data, as well as identify outliers or anomalies. Clustering can also be used for customer segmentation, which is the process of dividing customers into groups based on their characteristics, behaviors, preferences, or needs. Customer segmentation can help understand the key features and needs of different customer segments, as well as design and implement targeted marketing campaigns for each segment. In this case, the Marketing Manager at a pet insurance company plans to launch a targeted marketing campaign on social media to acquire new customers. To do this, the Manager can use clustering on customer profile data to understand the key characteristics of consumer segments, such as their demographics, pet types, policy preferences, premiums paid, claims made, etc. The Manager can then find similar profiles on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., by using the cluster features as filters or keywords. The Manager can then target these potential new customers with personalized and relevant ads or offers that match their segment’s needs and interests. This way, the Manager can implement a machine learning model to identify potential new customers on social media.

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

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

• Option A: The factorization machines (FM) algorithm is a general-purpose supervised learning algorithm that can be used for both classification and regression tasks. However, it is not optimized for capturing associations between entities and IP addresses, and would require labeling each record as either a successful or failed access attempt, which is a costly and time-consuming process.
• Option C: The IP Insights algorithm is a good choice for this use case, but it does not require labeling each record as either a successful or failed access attempt. The algorithm is unsupervised and can learn from the historical data without labels. Labeling the data would be unnecessary and wasteful.
• Option D: The Object2Vec algorithm is a general-purpose neural embedding algorithm that can learn low-dimensional dense embeddings of high-dimensional objects. However, it is not designed to capture associations between entities and IP addresses, and would require a different input format than the one provided by the company. The Object2Vec algorithm expects pairs of objects and their relationship labels or scores as inputs, while the company has data containing the source IP addresses and the login names of the requesting users.

References:

• IP Insights - Amazon SageMaker
• Factorization Machines Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker
• Object2Vec Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

The best option is to use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) with table mapping to select PostgreSQL tables with no sensitive data through an SSL connection. Replicate data directly into Amazon S3. This option meets the following requirements:

• It ensures that only nonsensitive data is transferred to the cloud by using table mapping to filter out the tables that contain sensitive data1.
• It uses IPsec to secure the data transfer by enabling SSL encryption for the AWS DMS endpoint2.
• It uploads the data to Amazon S3 each day for model retraining by using the ongoing replication feature of AWS DMS3.

The other options are not as effective or feasible as the option above. Creating an AWS Glue job to connect to the PostgreSQL DB instance and ingest data through an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection directly into Amazon S3 is possible, but it requires more steps and resources than using AWS DMS. Also, it does not specify how to filter out the sensitive data from the tables. Creating an AWS Glue job to connect to the PostgreSQL DB instance and ingest all data through an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection into Amazon S3 while removing sensitive data using a PySpark job is also possible, but it is more complex and error-prone than using AWS DMS. Also, it does not use IPsec as required. Using PostgreSQL logical replication to replicate all data to PostgreSQL in Amazon EC2 through AWS Direct Connect with a VPN connection, and then using AWS Glue to move data from Amazon EC2 to Amazon S3 is not feasible, because PostgreSQL logical replication does not support replicating only a subset of data4. Also, it involves unnecessary data movement and additional costs.

References:

• Table mapping - AWS Database Migration Service
• Using SSL to encrypt a connection to a DB instance - AWS Database Migration Service
• Ongoing replication - AWS Database Migration Service
• Logical replication - PostgreSQL

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

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

References:

• Effective Strategies to Handle Missing Values in Data Analysis
• How To Handle Missing Values In Machine Learning Data With Weka
• How to handle missing values in Python - Machine Learning Plus

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

References:

• 1: Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker