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

Automating recurrent tasks

Training an ML model is a complex iterative process that includes data preparation, feature engineering, model selection, optimization, and deployment. Above all, an enterprise-grade end-to-end ML pipeline needs to be reproducible, interpretable, secure, and automated, which poses an additional challenge for most companies in terms of know-how, costs, and infrastructure requirements.

In the previous chapters, we learned the ins and outs of this process, so we can confirm that there is nothing simple or easy about it. Tuning a feature engineering approach will affect model training; the missing value strategy during data cleansing will influence the optimization process.

Above all, the information that's captured by your model is rarely constant, so most ML models require frequent retraining and deployments. This leads to a whole new requirement for MLOps: a DevOps pipeline for ML to ensure continuous integration and continuous deployment of your...