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

Custom compute services for ML

So far, we have had a look at services offering managed pre-trained ML models with and without some degree of customization, as well as custom ML services, including Azure Machine Learning. Azure Machine Learning is our service of choice for developing custom ML applications, due to the great trade-off between flexibility, functionality, and comfort.

However, we understand that these trade-offs might not work for everyone and that some people want the highest flexibility for building custom ML applications using only IaaS services. These are the same services that build the foundation for any other PaaS service in Azure, including Azure Machine Learning. Hence, as a final step, we will delve into options where you can use custom compute services in Azure to build flexible ML solutions.

Azure Databricks

Azure Databricks is a managed service on Azure, offering the Databricks platform as a completely integrated solution. Azure Databricks is, therefore...