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

Understanding and applying feature engineering

Feature engineering is the general term that describes the process of transforming existing features in our dataset, creating missing features, and eventually selecting the most predictive features from our dataset to start the ML training process with a given ML algorithm. These cannot just be seen as some mathematical functions we must apply to our data. This is an art form and doing it well makes the difference between a mediocre and highly performing predictive model. If you want to understand where you should invest your time, feature engineering is the step where you can have the most impact on the quality of your final ML model. To create this impact and be efficient, we must consider the following:

  • ML algorithm requirements: Do the features have to be in a specific format or range? How do I best avoid overfitting and underfitting the model?
  • Domain knowledge: Are the given features sufficient for our model? Can we create...