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

Introduction to recommendation engines

In today's digital world, recommendation engines are ubiquitous among many industries. Many online businesses, such as streaming, shopping, news, and social media, rely at their core on recommending the most relevant articles, news, and items to their users. How often have you clicked on a suggested video on YouTube, scrolled through your Facebook feed, listened to a personalized playlist on Spotify, or clicked on a recommended item on Amazon?

If you ask yourself what the term relevant means for the different services and industries, you are on the right track. In order to recommend relevant information to the user, we need to first define a relevancy metric, and a way to describe and compare different items and their similarity. These two properties are the key to understanding the different recommendation engines. We will learn more about this in the following sections of this chapter.

While the purpose of a recommendation engine...