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

Chapter 6: Feature Engineering and Labeling

In the previous chapter, we learned how to clean our data and do basic statistical analysis. In this chapter, we will delve into two more types of actions we must perform before we can start our ML training. These two steps are the most important of all besides efficiently cleaning your dataset, and to be good at them, you will require a high amount of experience. This chapter will give you a basis to build upon.

In the first section, we will learn about feature engineering. We will understand the process, how to select predictive features from our dataset, and what methods exist to transform features from our dataset to make them usable for our ML algorithm.

In the second section, we will look at data labeling. Most ML algorithms fall into the category of supervised learning, which means they require labeled training data. We will look at some typical scenarios that require labels and learn how Azure Machine Learning can help with...