Book Image

Mastering Azure Machine Learning - Second Edition

By : Körner, Alsdorf
Book Image

Mastering Azure Machine Learning - Second Edition

By: Körner, 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, we discussed the need for different types of recommendation engines, from non-personalized ones to rating- and content-based ones, as well as hybrid models.

We learned that content-based recommendation engines use feature vectors and cosine similarity to compute similar items and users based on content alone. This allows us to make recommendations via k-means clustering or tree-based regression models. One important consideration is the embedding of categorical data, which, if possible, should use semantic embedding to avoid confusing similarities based on one-hot or label encodings.

Rating-based recommendations or collaborative filtering methods rely on user-item interactions, so-called ratings, or feedback. While explicit feedback is the most obvious possibility for collecting user ratings through ordinal or binary scales, we need to make sure that those ratings are properly normalized.

Another possibility is to directly observe the feedback through...