Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 Exam

 A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier is a suitable architecture for image classification tasks, as it can learn features from the images and reduce the dimensionality of the input. A linear output layer that outputs the probability that an image contains a car is appropriate for a binary classification problem, as it can produce a single scalar value between 0 and 1. A softmax output layer is more suitable for a multi-class classification problem, as it can produce a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1. A deep multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier is not as effective as a CNN for image classification, as it does not exploit the spatial structure of the images and requires a large number of parameters to process the high-dimensional input. References:

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS

AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS

Residuals are the differences between the actual and predicted values of the target variable in a regression model. A histogram of residuals is a graphical tool that can help evaluate the performance and assumptions of the model. Ideally, the histogram of residuals should have a zero-centered bell shape, which indicates that the residuals are normally distributed with a mean of zero and a constant variance. This means that the model has captured the true relationship between the input and output variables, and that the errors are random and unbiased. However, if the histogram of residuals does not have a zero-centered bell shape, as shown in the image, this means that the model might have prediction errors over a range of target values. This is because the residuals do not form a symmetrical and homogeneous distribution around zero, which implies that the model has some systematic bias or heteroscedasticity. This can affect the accuracy and validity of the model, and indicate that the model needs to be improved or modified.

Residual Analysis in Regression - Statistics By Jim

How to Check Residual Plots for Regression Analysis - dummies

Histogram of Residuals - Statistics How To

The Data Scientist is building a model to predict customer churn using a dataset of 100 continuous numerical features. The Marketing team wants to interpret the model and see the direct impact of relevant features on the model outcome. However, the Data Scientist observes that there is a wide gap between the training and validation set accuracy, which indicates that the model is overfitting the data and generalizing poorly to new data.

To improve the model performance and satisfy the Marketing team’s needs, the Data Scientist can use the following methods:

Add L1 regularization to the classifier: L1 regularization is a technique that adds a penalty term to the loss function of the logistic regression model, proportional to the sum of the absolute values of the coefficients. L1 regularization can help reduce overfitting by shrinking the coefficients of the less important features to zero, effectively performing feature selection. This can simplify the model and make it more interpretable, as well as improve the validation accuracy.

Perform recursive feature elimination: Recursive feature elimination (RFE) is a feature selection technique that involves training a model on a subset of the features, and then iteratively removing the least important features one by one until the desired number of features is reached. The idea behind RFE is to determine the contribution of each feature to the model by measuring how well the model performs when that feature is removed. The features that are most important to the model will have the greatest impact on performance when they are removed. RFE can help improve the model performance by eliminating the irrelevant or redundant features that may cause noise or multicollinearity in the data. RFE can also help the Marketing team understand the direct impact of the relevant features on the model outcome, as the remaining features will have the highest weights in the model.

Regularization for Logistic Regression

Recursive Feature Elimination

 The simplest and fastest way to use the EFS dataset for SageMaker training is to run a SageMaker training job with an EFS file system as the data source. This option does not require any data copying or additional integration steps. SageMaker supports EFS as a data source for training jobs, and it can mount the EFS file system to the training container using the FileSystemConfig parameter. This way, the training script can access the data files as if they were on the local disk of the training instance. References:

Access Training Data - Amazon SageMaker

Mount an EFS file system to an Amazon SageMaker notebook (with lifecycle configurations) | AWS Machine Learning Blog

 AWS KMS is a service that provides encryption and key management for data stored in AWS services and applications. AWS KMS can generate and manage encryption keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt data at rest and in transit. AWS KMS can also integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon SageMaker, to enable encryption of data using the keys stored in AWS KMS. Amazon S3 is a service that provides object storage for data in the cloud. Amazon S3 can use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest using server-side encryption with AWS KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS). Amazon SageMaker is a service that provides a platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker can use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest on the SageMaker instances and volumes, as well as data in transit between SageMaker and other AWS services. AWS Glue is a service that provides a serverless data integration platform for data preparation and transformation. AWS Glue can use AWS KMS to encrypt data at rest on the Glue Data Catalog and Glue ETL jobs. AWS Glue can also use built-in or custom classifiers to identify and redact sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, from the customer data1234

The other options are not valid or secure ways to encrypt the data and protect the credit card information. Using a custom encryption algorithm to encrypt the data and store the data on an Amazon SageMaker instance in a VPC is not a good practice, as custom encryption algorithms are not recommended for security and may have flaws or vulnerabilities. Using the SageMaker DeepAR algorithm to randomize the credit card numbers is not a good practice, as DeepAR is a forecasting algorithm that is not designed for data anonymization or encryption. Using an IAM policy to encrypt the data on the Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon Kinesis to automatically discard credit card numbers and insert fake credit card numbers is not a good practice, as IAM policies are not meant for data encryption, but for access control and authorization. Amazon Kinesis is a service that provides real-time data streaming and processing, but it does not have the capability to automatically discard or insert data values. Using an Amazon SageMaker launch configuration to encrypt the data once it is copied to the SageMaker instance in a VPC is not a good practice, as launch configurations are not meant for data encryption, but for specifying the instance type, security group, and user data for the SageMaker instance. Using the SageMaker principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to reduce the length of the credit card numbers is not a good practice, as PCA is a dimensionality reduction algorithm that is not designed for data anonymization or encryption.

The metrics that will indicate an ML solution that will provide the greatest probability of detecting an abnormality are precision and recall. Precision is the ratio of true positives (TP) to the total number of predicted positives (TP + FP), where FP is false positives. Recall is the ratio of true positives (TP) to the total number of actual positives (TP + FN), where FN is false negatives. A high precision means that the ML solution has a low rate of false alarms, while a high recall means that the ML solution has a high rate of true detections. For the chemical company, the goal is to avoid process abnormalities, which are marked as 1 in the labels. Therefore, the company needs an ML solution that has a high recall for the positive class, meaning that it can detect most of the abnormalities and minimize the false negatives. Among the four options, option B has the highest recall for the positive class, which is 0.98. This means that the ML solution can detect 98% of the abnormalities and miss only 2%. Option B also has a reasonable precision for the positive class, which is 0.61. This means that the ML solution has a false alarm rate of 39%, which may be acceptable for the company, depending on the cost and benefit analysis. The other options have lower recall for the positive class, which means that they have higher false negative rates, which can be more detrimental for the company than false positive rates.

1: AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide

2: AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS

3: AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS

4: Precision and recall

Amazon SageMaker Experiments is a service that helps track, compare, and evaluate different iterations of ML models. It can be used to capture key parameters such as the number of features and the sample count from a PySpark script that runs as a SageMaker processing job. A SageMaker processing job is a flexible and scalable way to run data processing workloads on AWS, such as feature engineering, data validation, model evaluation, and model interpretation.

Amazon SageMaker Experiments

Process Data and Evaluate Models

According to the Amazon Kinesis Data Streams documentation, the maximum size of data blob (the data payload before Base64-encoding) per record is 1 MB. The maximum number of records that can be sent to a shard per second is 1,000. Therefore, the maximum throughput of a shard is 1 MB/sec for input and 2 MB/sec for output. In this case, the input throughput is 100 transactions per second * 100 KB per transaction = 10 MB/sec. Therefore, the minimum number of shards required is 10 MB/sec / 1 MB/sec = 10 shards. However, the question asks for the minimum number of shards in Kinesis Data Streams, not the minimum number of shards per stream. A Kinesis Data Streams account can have multiple streams, each with its own number of shards. Therefore, the minimum number of shards in Kinesis Data Streams is 1, which is the minimum number of shards per stream. References:

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Terminology and Concepts

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Limits

The solution C will create a new dataset with the added features with the least operational overhead because it uses Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which is a service that simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering for machine learning. The solution C involves the following steps:

Create a new flow in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. A flow is a visual representation of the data preparation steps that can be applied to one or more datasets. The data scientist can create a new flow in the Amazon SageMaker Studio interface and import the S3 file as a data source1.

Use the Featurize date/time transform to generate the new variables. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides a set of preconfigured transformations that can be applied to the data with a few clicks. The Featurize date/time transform can parse a date/time column and generate new columns for the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, day of week, and day of year. The data scientist can use this transform to create the new variables from the timestamp variable2.

Save the dataset as a new file in Amazon S3. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler can export the transformed dataset as a new file in Amazon S3, or as a feature store in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store. The data scientist can choose the output format and location of the new file3.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Creating an Amazon EMR cluster and developing PySpark code that can read the timestamp variable as a string, transform and create the new variables, and save the dataset as a new file in Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to manage the Amazon EMR cluster, the PySpark application, and the data storage. Moreover, the data scientist will have to write custom code for the date/time parsing and feature generation, which may require more development effort and testing4.

Option B: Creating a processing job in Amazon SageMaker and developing Python code that can read the timestamp variable as a string, transform and create the new variables, and save the dataset as a new file in Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to manage the processing job, the Python code, and the data storage. Moreover, the data scientist will have to write custom code for the date/time parsing and feature generation, which may require more development effort and testing5.

Option D: Creating an AWS Glue job and developing code that can read the timestamp variable as a string, transform and create the new variables, and save the dataset as a new file in Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to manage the AWS Glue job, the code, and the data storage. Moreover, the data scientist will have to write custom code for the date/time parsing and feature generation, which may require more development effort and testing6.

1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler

2: Featurize Date/Time - Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler

3: Exporting Data - Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler

4: Amazon EMR

5: Processing Jobs - Amazon SageMaker

6: AWS Glue

The best way to fix the problem without changing the Lambda code or data in DynamoDB is to add the unrecognized words as synonyms in the custom slot type. This way, Amazon Lex can resolve the synonyms to the corresponding slot values and pass them to the Lambda function. For example, if the slot type has a value “comedy” with synonyms “funny”, “fun”, and “humor”, then any of these words entered by the user will be resolved to “comedy” and the Lambda function can query the DynamoDB table for the book titles in that category. Adding synonyms to the custom slot type can be done easily using the Amazon Lex console or API, and does not require any code changes.

The other options are not correct because:

Option A: Adding the unrecognized words in the enumeration values list as new values in the slot type would not fix the problem, because the Lambda function and the DynamoDB table are not aware of these new values. The Lambda function would not be able to query the DynamoDB table for the book titles in the new categories, and the request would still fail. Moreover, adding new values to the slot type would increase the complexity and maintenance of the chatbot, as the Lambda function and the DynamoDB table would have to be updated accordingly.

Option B: Creating a new custom slot type, adding the unrecognized words to this slot type as enumeration values, and using this slot type for the slot would also not fix the problem, for the same reasons as option A. The Lambda function and the DynamoDB table would not be able to handle the new slot type and its values, and the request would still fail. Furthermore, creating a new slot type would require more effort and time than adding synonyms to the existing slot type.

Option C: Using the AMAZON.SearchQuery built-in slot types for custom searches in the database is not a suitable approach for this use case. The AMAZON.SearchQuery slot type is used to capture free-form user input that corresponds to a search query. However, this slot type does not perform any validation or resolution of the user input, and passes the raw input to the Lambda function. This means that the Lambda function would have to handle the logic of parsing and matching the user input to the DynamoDB table, which would require changing the Lambda code and adding more complexity to the solution.

Custom slot type - Amazon Lex

Using Synonyms - Amazon Lex

Built-in Slot Types - Amazon Lex