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

Training an ensemble classifier model using LightGBM

Both random forest and gradient boosted trees are pretty powerful ML techniques due to their simple basis of decision trees and ensembles of multiple classifiers. In this example, we will use a popular library from Microsoft to implement both techniques on a test dataset: LightGBM, a framework for gradient boosting that incorporates multiple tree-based learning algorithms.

For this section, we will follow a typical best-practice approach using Azure Machine Learning and perform the following steps:

  1. Register the dataset in Azure.
  2. Create a remote compute cluster.
  3. Implement a configurable training script.
  4. Run the training script on the compute cluster.
  5. Log and collect the dataset, parameters, and performance.
  6. Register the trained model.

Before we start with this exciting approach, we'll take a quick look at why we chose LightGBM as a tool for training bagged and boosted tree ensembles.

LightGBM...