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

Exploring methods for distributed ML

The journey of implementing ML pipelines is very similar for a lot of users and is often similar to the steps described in the previous chapters. When users start switching from experimentation to real-world data or from small examples to larger models, they often experience a similar issue: training large parametric models on large amounts of data—especially DL models—takes a very long time. Sometimes, epochs last hours, and training takes days to converge.

Waiting hours or even days for a model to converge means precious time wasted for many engineers, as it makes it a lot harder to interactively tune the training process. Therefore, many ML engineers need to speed up their training process by leveraging various distributed computing techniques. The idea of distributed ML is as simple as speeding up a training process by adding more compute resources. In the best case, the training performance improves linearly by adding more...