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

10. Distributed machine learning on Azure

In the previous chapter, we learned about hyperparameter tuning, through search and optimization using HyperDrive as well as Azure Automated Machine Learning, as a special case of hyperparameter optimization, involving feature engineering, model selection, and model stacking. Automated machine learning is machine learning as a service (MLaaS) where the only input is your data, a ML task, and an error metric. It's hard to imagine running all the experiments and parameter combinations for Azure Automated Machine Learning on a single machine or a single CPU/GPU—we are looking into ways to speed up the training process through parallelization and distributed computing.

In this chapter, we will take a look into distributed and parallel computing algorithms and frameworks for efficiently training ML models in parallel. The goal of this chapter is to build an environment in Azure where you can speed up the training process of...