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

Managing data and datasets in the cloud

When you run an ML experiment or pipeline on your local development machine, you often don't need to manage your datasets as they are stored locally. However, as soon as you start training an ML model on remote compute targets, such as a VM in the cloud, you must make sure that the script can access the training data. And if you deploy a model that requires a certain dataset during scoring—for example, the lookup data for labels and the like—then this environment needs to access the data as well. As you can see, it makes sense to abstract the datasets for an ML project, both from the point of view of physical access and access permissions.

First, we will show how you can create a data store object to connect the Azure Machine Learning workspace to other data services, such as blob or file storage, data lake storage, and relational data stores, such as SQL Server and PostgreSQL. Once a data store is attached, we can register...