Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 Exam

The solution that will meet the requirements with the least development effort is to use Amazon SageMaker Feature Store to set feature groups for the current features that the ML models use, assign the required metadata for each feature, and use Amazon QuickSight to analyze the metadata. This solution can leverage the existing AWS services and features to perform feature-level metadata analysis and reporting.

Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a fully managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, search, and share machine learning (ML) features. The service provides feature management capabilities such as enabling easy feature reuse, low latency serving, time travel, and ensuring consistency between features used in training and inference workflows. A feature group is a logical grouping of ML features whose organization and structure is defined by a feature group schema. A feature group schema consists of a list of feature definitions, each of which specifies the name, type, and metadata of a feature. The metadata can include information such as data sensitivity, authorship, description, and parameters. The metadata can help make features discoverable, understandable, and traceable. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store allows users to set feature groups for the current features that the ML models use, and assign the required metadata for each feature using the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3), AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or Amazon SageMaker Studio1.

Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed, serverless business intelligence service that makes it easy to create and publish interactive dashboards that include ML insights. Amazon QuickSight can connect to various data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and analyze the data using standard SQL or built-in ML-powered analytics. Amazon QuickSight can also create rich visualizations and reports that can be accessed from any device, and securely shared with anyone inside or outside an organization. Amazon QuickSight can be used to analyze the metadata of the features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and generate a report that summarizes the metadata analysis2.

The other options are either more complex or less effective than the proposed solution. Using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler to select the features and create a data flow to perform feature-level metadata analysis would require additional steps and resources, and may not capture all the metadata attributes that the company requires. Creating an Amazon DynamoDB table to store feature-level metadata would introduce redundancy and inconsistency, as the metadata is already stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store. Using SageMaker Studio to analyze the metadata would not generate a report that can be easily shared and accessed by the company.

1: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store – Amazon Web Services

2: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence Service - Amazon Web Services

 Pushing the data from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon S3 using an AWS Data Pipeline and providing the S3 location within the notebook is the best approach for training a model using the data stored in Amazon RDS. This is because Amazon SageMaker can directly access data from Amazon S3 and train models on it. AWS Data Pipeline is a service that can automate the movement and transformation of data between different AWS services. It can also use Amazon RDS as a data source and Amazon S3 as a data destination. This way, the data can be transferred efficiently and securely without writing any code within the notebook. References:

Amazon SageMaker

AWS Data Pipeline

The solution that will accomplish the necessary transformation to train the Amazon SageMaker model with the least amount of administrative overhead is to crawl the data using AWS Glue crawlers, write an AWS Glue ETL job that merges the two tables and writes the output in CSV format to Amazon S3. This solution leverages the serverless capabilities of AWS Glue to automatically discover the schema of the data sources, and to perform the data integration and transformation without requiring any cluster management or configuration. The output in CSV format is compatible with Amazon SageMaker and can be easily loaded into a training job. References: AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker

SageMaker Data Wrangler is a feature of SageMaker Studio that provides an end-to-end solution for importing, preparing, transforming, featurizing, and analyzing data. Data Wrangler includes built-in analyses that help generate visualizations and data insights in a few clicks. One of the built-in analyses is the Quick Model visualization, which can be used to quickly evaluate the data and produce importance scores for each feature. A feature importance score indicates how useful a feature is at predicting a target label. The feature importance score is between [0, 1] and a higher number indicates that the feature is more important to the whole dataset. The Quick Model visualization uses a random forest model to calculate the feature importance for each feature using the Gini importance method. This method measures the total reduction in node impurity (a measure of how well a node separates the classes) that is attributed to splitting on a particular feature. The ML developer can use the Quick Model visualization to obtain the importance scores for each feature of the dataset and use them to feature engineer the dataset. This solution requires the least development effort compared to the other options.

Collaborative filtering is a machine learning technique that recommends products or services to users based on the ratings or preferences of other users. This technique is well-suited for identifying customer shopping patterns and preferences because it takes into account the interactions between users and products.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a managed service designed to detect potentially fraudulent online activities, such as transactions. It uses machine learning and business rules to classify activities as fraudulent or legitimate, minimizing the need for custom model training. By using the Amazon Fraud Detector prediction API, the company can automatically approve or reject transactions flagged as fraudulent, implementing an efficient risk mitigation strategy without extensive operational effort.

This approach requires minimal setup and effectively allows the company to block fraudulent transactions with high confidence, addressing the business's need to balance risk mitigation and customer impact.

A collaborative filtering recommendation engine is a type of machine learning system that can improve sales for a company by using the large amount of information the company has on users’ behavior and product preferences to predict which products users would like based on the users’ similarity to other users. A collaborative filtering recommendation engine works by finding the users who have similar ratings or preferences for the products, and then recommending the products that the similar users have liked but the target user has not seen or rated. A collaborative filtering recommendation engine can leverage the collective wisdom of the users and discover the hidden patterns and associations among the products and the users. A collaborative filtering recommendation engine can be implemented using Apache Spark ML on Amazon EMR, which are two services that can handle large-scale data processing and machine learning tasks. Apache Spark ML is a library that provides various tools and algorithms for machine learning, such as classification, regression, clustering, recommendation, etc. Apache Spark ML can run on Amazon EMR, which is a service that provides a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as Apache Spark, on AWS. Apache Spark ML on Amazon EMR can build a collaborative filtering recommendation engine using the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm, which is a matrix factorization technique that can learn the latent factors that represent the users and the products, and then use them to predict the ratings or preferences of the users for the products. Apache Spark ML on Amazon EMR can also support both explicit feedback, such as ratings or reviews, and implicit feedback, such as views or clicks, for building a collaborative filtering recommendation engine12

 XGBoost is a built-in Amazon SageMaker machine learning algorithm that should be used for modeling the credit card fraud detection problem. XGBoost is an algorithm that implements a scalable and distributed gradient boosting framework, which is a popular and effective technique for supervised learning problems. Gradient boosting is a method of combining multiple weak learners, such as decision trees, into a strong learner, by iteratively fitting new models to the residual errors of the previous models and adding them to the ensemble. XGBoost can handle various types of data, such as numerical, categorical, or text, and can perform both regression and classification tasks. XGBoost also supports various features and optimizations, such as regularization, missing value handling, parallelization, and cross-validation, that can improve the performance and efficiency of the algorithm.

XGBoost is suitable for the credit card fraud detection problem for the following reasons:

The problem is a binary classification problem, where the goal is to predict whether a transaction is fraudulent or not, based on the information from new transactions. XGBoost can perform binary classification by using a logistic regression objective function and outputting the probability of the positive class (fraudulent) for each transaction.

The problem involves a large and imbalanced dataset of historical data labeled as fraudulent. XGBoost can handle large-scale and imbalanced data by using distributed and parallel computing, as well as techniques such as weighted sampling, class weighting, or stratified sampling, to balance the classes and reduce the bias towards the majority class (non-fraudulent).

The problem requires a high accuracy and precision for detecting fraudulent transactions, as well as a low false positive rate for avoiding false alarms. XGBoost can achieve high accuracy and precision by using gradient boosting, which can learn complex and non-linear patterns from the data and reduce the variance and overfitting of the model. XGBoost can also achieve a low false positive rate by using regularization, which can reduce the complexity and noise of the model and prevent it from fitting spurious signals in the data.

The other options are not as suitable as XGBoost for the credit card fraud detection problem for the following reasons:

Seq2seq: Seq2seq is an algorithm that implements a sequence-to-sequence model, which is a type of neural network model that can map an input sequence to an output sequence. Seq2seq is mainly used for natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, or dialogue generation. Seq2seq is not suitable for the credit card fraud detection problem, because the problem is not a sequence-to-sequence task, but a binary classification task. The input and output of the problem are not sequences of words or tokens, but vectors of features and labels.

K-means: K-means is an algorithm that implements a clustering technique, which is a type of unsupervised learning method that can group similar data points into clusters. K-means is mainly used for exploratory data analysis, dimensionality reduction, or anomaly detection. K-means is not suitable for the credit card fraud detection problem, because the problem is not a clustering task, but a classification task. The problem requires using the labeled data to train a model that can predict the labels of new data, not finding the optimal number of clusters or the cluster memberships of the data.

Random Cut Forest (RCF): RCF is an algorithm that implements an anomaly detection technique, which is a type of unsupervised learning method that can identify data points that deviate from the normal behavior or distribution of the data. RCF is mainly used for detecting outliers, frauds, or faults in the data. RCF is not suitable for the credit card fraud detection problem, because the problem is not an anomaly detection task, but a classification task. The problem requires using the labeled data to train a model that can predict the labels of new data, not finding the anomaly scores or the anomalous data points in the data.

XGBoost Algorithm

Use XGBoost for Binary Classification with Amazon SageMaker

Seq2seq Algorithm

K-means Algorithm

[Random Cut Forest Algorithm]

To develop a daily ETL workflow containing multiple ETL jobs that can start as soon as data is uploaded to Amazon S3, the best configuration is to use AWS Lambda to trigger an AWS Step Functions workflow to wait for dataset uploads to complete in Amazon S3. Use AWS Glue to join the datasets. Use an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to send an SNS notification to the Administrator in the case of a failure.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can use Lambda to create functions that respond to events such as data uploads to Amazon S3. You can also use Lambda to invoke other AWS services such as AWS Step Functions and AWS Glue.

AWS Step Functions is a service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. You can use Step Functions to create a state machine that defines the sequence and logic of your ETL workflow. You can also use Step Functions to handle errors and retries, and to monitor the execution status of your workflow.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics. You can use Glue to create and run ETL jobs that can join data from multiple sources in Amazon S3. You can also use Glue to catalog your data and make it searchable and queryable.

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors your AWS resources and applications. You can use CloudWatch to create alarms that trigger actions when a metric or a log event meets a specified threshold. You can also use CloudWatch to send notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics, which can then deliver the notifications to subscribers such as email addresses or phone numbers.

Therefore, by using these services together, you can achieve the following benefits:

You can start the ETL workflow as soon as data is uploaded to Amazon S3 by using Lambda functions to trigger Step Functions workflows.

You can wait for all the datasets to be available in Amazon S3 by using Step Functions to poll the S3 buckets and check the data completeness.

You can join the datasets with terabyte-sized datasets in Amazon S3 by using Glue ETL jobs that can scale and parallelize the data processing.

You can store the results of joining datasets in Amazon S3 by using Glue ETL jobs to write the output to S3 buckets.

You can send a notification to the Administrator if one of the jobs fails by using CloudWatch alarms to monitor the Step Functions or Glue metrics and send SNS notifications in case of a failure.

The best storage option for the trucking company is to use an Amazon S3-backed data lake to store the raw images, and set up the permissions using bucket policies. A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. Amazon S3 is the ideal choice for building a data lake because it offers high durability, scalability, availability, and security. You can store any type of data in Amazon S3, such as images, videos, audio, text, etc. You can also use AWS services such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon EMR to analyze and process the data in the data lake. To ensure the data is only accessible to specific IAM users, you can use bucket policies to grant or deny access to the S3 buckets based on the IAM user’s identity or role. Bucket policies are JSON documents that specify the permissions for the bucket and the objects in it. You can use conditions to restrict access based on various factors, such as IP address, time, source, etc. By using bucket policies, you can control who can access the data in the data lake and what actions they can perform on it.

AWS Machine Learning Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Machine Learning Training - Build a Data Lake Foundation with Amazon S3

AWS Machine Learning Training - Using Bucket Policies and User Policies