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

6. Advanced feature extraction with NLP

In the previous chapters, we learned about many standard transformation and preprocessing approaches within the Azure Machine Learning (ML) service and Azure Machine Learning pipelines. In this chapter, we want to go one step further to extract features from textual and categorical data—a problem that users often face when training ML models.

This chapter will describe the foundations of feature extraction with Natural Language Processing (NLP). This will help you to practically implement semantic embeddings using NLP for your ML pipelines.

First, we will take a look at the differences between textual, categorical, nominal, and ordinal data. This classification will help you to decide the best feature extraction and transformation technique per feature type. Later, we will look at the most common transformations for categorical values, namely label encoding and one-hot encoding. Both techniques will be compared and tested to...