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

Creating a datastore and ingesting data

After having a look through the options for storing data in Azure for ML processing, we will now create a storage account, which we will use throughout the book for our raw data and ML datasets. In addition, we will have a look at how to transfer some data into our storage account manually and how to perform this task automatically by utilizing integration engines available in Azure.

Creating Blob Storage and connecting it with the Azure Machine Learning workspace

Let's start by creating a storage account. Any storage account will come with a file share, a queue, and table storage for you to utilize in other scenarios. In addition to those three, you can either end up with Blob Storage or a Data Lake, depending on the settings you provide at creation time. By default, a Blob storage account will be created. If we instead want a Data Lake account, we must set the enable-hierarchical-namespace setting to True, as Data Lake offers an...