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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to navigate the Azure AI landscape and choose the right ML service for your application and domain. While IaaS services give you great flexibility, PaaS services often provide useful abstractions and manage complex integrations for you. SaaS applications are great if they are designed for your application domain or can be customized.

We investigated Azure services for building ML applications in each of the preceding categories, such as Azure Cognitive Services (SaaS), Azure Machine Learning (PaaS), and Azure Batch (IaaS). Azure Machine Learning is not only the most comprehensive and integrated ML service in Azure but also provides a good trade-off between flexibility, functionality, and comfort. Therefore, we will use Azure Machine Learning throughout this book to develop an end-to-end custom ML solution.

If you really want to build your own ML infrastructure from scratch and not rely on any managed ML service, you should look into custom...