Book Image

Mastering Azure Machine Learning - Second Edition

By : Christoph Körner, Marcel Alsdorf
Book Image

Mastering Azure Machine Learning - Second Edition

By: Christoph Körner, Marcel Alsdorf

Overview of this book

Azure Machine Learning is a cloud service for accelerating and managing the machine learning (ML) project life cycle that ML professionals, data scientists, and engineers can use in their day-to-day workflows. This book covers the end-to-end ML process using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, including data preparation, performing and logging ML training runs, designing training and deployment pipelines, and managing these pipelines via MLOps. The first section shows you how to set up an Azure Machine Learning workspace; ingest and version datasets; as well as preprocess, label, and enrich these datasets for training. In the next two sections, you'll discover how to enrich and train ML models for embedding, classification, and regression. You'll explore advanced NLP techniques, traditional ML models such as boosted trees, modern deep neural networks, recommendation systems, reinforcement learning, and complex distributed ML training techniques - all using Azure Machine Learning. The last section will teach you how to deploy the trained models as a batch pipeline or real-time scoring service using Docker, Azure Machine Learning clusters, Azure Kubernetes Services, and alternative deployment targets. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to combine all the steps you’ve learned by building an MLOps pipeline.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Azure Machine Learning
5
Section 2: Data Ingestion, Preparation, Feature Engineering, and Pipelining
11
Section 3: The Training and Optimization of Machine Learning Models
17
Section 4: Machine Learning Model Deployment and Operations

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to build a classical ML model in Azure Machine Learning.

You learned about decision trees, a popular technique for various classification and regression problems. The main strengths of decision trees are that they require little data preparation as they work well on categorical data and different data distributions. Another important benefit is their interpretability, which is especially important for business decisions and users. This helps you to understand when a decision tree-based ensemble predictor is appropriate to use.

However, we also learned about a set of weaknesses, especially regarding overfitting and poor generalization. Luckily, tree-based ensemble techniques such as bagging (bootstrap aggregation) and boosting help to overcome these problems. While bagging has popular methods such as random forests that parallelize very well, boosting, especially gradient boosting, has efficient implementations, including XGBoost and LightGBM...