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

11. Building a recommendation engine in Azure

In the previous chapter, we discussed distributed training methods for machine learning (ML) models, and you learned how to train distributed ML models efficiently in Azure. In this chapter, we will dive into traditional and modern recommendation engines, which often combine technologies and techniques covered in the previous chapters.

First, we will take a quick look at the different types of recommendation engines, what data is needed for each type, and what can be recommended using these different approaches.

This will help you understand when to choose from non-personalized, content-based, or rating-based recommenders.

After this, we will dive into content-based recommendations, namely item-item and user- user recommenders based on feature vectors and similarity. You will learn about cosine distance to measure the similarity between feature vectors and feature engineering techniques to avoid common pitfalls while building...