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

A content-based recommender system

We first start with content-based recommendations, as they are the most similar to what we previously discussed in this book. The term content refers to the usage of only an item's or user's content information in the shape of a (numeric) feature vector. The way to arrive at a feature vector from an item (an article in a web shop) or a user (a browser session in a web service) is through data mining, data pre-processing, and feature engineering – skills you learned in the previous chapters.

Using users' and items' feature vectors, we can divide content-based recommendations into roughly two approaches:

  • Item-item similarity
  • User-user similarity

Hence, recommendations are based on the similarity of items or the similarity of users. Both approaches work great in cases where little to no interaction data between user and items is available (for example, a user with no purchase history on Amazon, no search...