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

Demystifying the different Azure services for ML

Azure offers many services that can be used to perform ML – you can use a simple Virtual Machine (VM), a pre-configured VM for ML (also called Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM)), Azure Notebooks using a shared free kernel, or any other service that gives you compute resources and data storage. Due to this flexibility, it is often very difficult to navigate through these services and pick the correct service for implementing an ML pipeline. In this section, we will provide clear guidance about how to choose the optimal ML and compute services in Azure.

First, it is important to discuss the difference between a simple compute resource, an ML infrastructure service, and an ML modeling service. This distinction will help you to better understand the following sections about how to choose these services for a specific use case:

  • A compute resource can be any service in Azure that provides you with computing power, such...