Book Image

Mastering Azure Machine Learning

By : Christoph Körner, Kaijisse Waaijer
Book Image

Mastering Azure Machine Learning

By: Christoph Körner, Kaijisse Waaijer

Overview of this book

The increase being seen in data volume today requires distributed systems, powerful algorithms, and scalable cloud infrastructure to compute insights and train and deploy machine learning (ML) models. This book will help you improve your knowledge of building ML models using Azure and end-to-end ML pipelines on the cloud. The book starts with an overview of an end-to-end ML project and a guide on how to choose the right Azure service for different ML tasks. It then focuses on Azure Machine Learning and takes you through the process of data experimentation, data preparation, and feature engineering using Azure Machine Learning and Python. You'll learn advanced feature extraction techniques using natural language processing (NLP), classical ML techniques, and the secrets of both a great recommendation engine and a performant computer vision model using deep learning methods. You'll also explore how to train, optimize, and tune models using Azure Automated Machine Learning and HyperDrive, and perform distributed training on Azure. Then, you'll learn different deployment and monitoring techniques using Azure Kubernetes Services with Azure Machine Learning, along with the basics of MLOps—DevOps for ML to automate your ML process as CI/CD pipeline. By the end of this book, you'll have mastered Azure Machine Learning and be able to confidently design, build and operate scalable ML pipelines in Azure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Azure Machine Learning
4
Section 2: Experimentation and Data Preparation
9
Section 3: Training Machine Learning Models
15
Section 4: Optimization and Deployment of Machine Learning Models
19
Index

Implementing a batch scoring pipeline

Operating batch scoring services is very similar to the previously discussed online-scoring approach—you provide an environment, compute target, and scoring file. However, in your scoring file, you would rather pass a path to a blob storage location with a new batch of data instead of the data itself. You can then use your scoring function to process the data asynchronously and output the predictions to a different storage location, back to the blob storage, or push the data asynchronously to the calling service.

It is up to you how you implement your scoring file as it is simply a Python script that you control. The only difference in the deployment process is that the batch-scoring script will be deployed as a pipeline on an Azure Machine Learning cluster, and triggered through a REST service. Therefore, it is important that your scoring script can be configured through command-line parameters. Remember that the difference with batch...