Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 Exam

The best solution for this scenario is to use a multi-model endpoint in Amazon SageMaker, which allows hosting multiple models on the same endpoint and invoking them dynamically at runtime. This way, the company can reduce the operational overhead of managing multiple EC2 instances and model servers, and leverage the scalability, security, and performance of SageMaker hosting services. By using a multi-model endpoint, the company can also save on hosting costs by improving endpoint utilization and paying only for the models that are loaded in memory and the API calls that are made. To use a multi-model endpoint, the company needs to prepare a Docker container based on the open-source multi-model server, which is a framework-agnostic library that supports loading and serving multiple models from Amazon S3. The company can then create a multi-model endpoint in SageMaker, pointing to the S3 bucket containing all the models, and invoke the endpoint from the web client at runtime, specifying the TargetModel parameter according to the city of each request. This solution also enables the company to add or remove models from the S3 bucket without redeploying the endpoint, and to use different versions of the same model for different cities if needed. References:

Use Docker containers to build models

Host multiple models in one container behind one endpoint

Multi-model endpoints using Scikit Learn

Multi-model endpoints using XGBoost

The best solution for this scenario is to use shadow deployment, which is a technique that allows the company to run the new experimental model in parallel with the existing model, without exposing it to the end users. In shadow deployment, the company can route the same user requests to both models, but only return the responses from the existing model to the users. The responses from the new experimental model are logged and analyzed for quality and performance metrics, such as accuracy, latency, and resource consumption12. This way, the company can validate the new experimental model in a production environment, without affecting the current live traffic or user experience.

The other solutions are not suitable, because they have the following drawbacks:

A: A/B testing is a technique that involves splitting the user traffic between two or more models, and comparing their outcomes based on predefined metrics. However, this technique exposes the new experimental model to a portion of the end users, which might affect their experience if the model is not reliable or consistent with the existing model3.

B: Canary release is a technique that involves gradually rolling out the new experimental model to a small subset of users, and monitoring its performance and feedback. However, this technique also exposes the new experimental model to some end users, and requires careful selection and segmentation of the user groups4.

D: Blue/green deployment is a technique that involves switching the user traffic from the existing model (blue) to the new experimental model (green) at once, after testing and verifying the new model in a separate environment. However, this technique does not allow the company to validate the new experimental model in a production environment, and might cause service disruption or inconsistency if the new model is not compatible or stable5.

1: Shadow Deployment: A Safe Way to Test in Production | LaunchDarkly Blog

2: Shadow Deployment: A Safe Way to Test in Production | LaunchDarkly Blog

3: A/B Testing for Machine Learning Models | AWS Machine Learning Blog

4: Canary Releases for Machine Learning Models | AWS Machine Learning Blog

5: Blue-Green Deployments for Machine Learning Models | AWS Machine Learning Blog

SageMaker’s TrainingJobEarlyStoppingType set to AUTO stops training jobs early when they no longer improve the objective metric, significantly reducing tuning job durations.

From AWS documentation:

“You can use early stopping to terminate training jobs that are unlikely to result in a better objective metric than previously completed jobs. This can reduce tuning costs and duration.”

— AWS SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning documentation

 The TensorFlow estimator configuration that will train the model most cost-effectively is to turn on SageMaker Training Compiler by adding compiler_config=TrainingCompilerConfig() as a parameter, turn on managed spot training by setting the use_spot_instances parameter to True, and pass the script to the estimator in the call to the TensorFlow fit() method. This configuration will optimize the model for the target hardware platform, reduce the training cost by using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, and use the custom Python script without any modification.

SageMaker Training Compiler is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to optimize your TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet models for inference on a variety of target hardware platforms. SageMaker Training Compiler can improve the inference performance and reduce the inference cost of your models by applying various compilation techniques, such as operator fusion, quantization, pruning, and graph optimization. You can enable SageMaker Training Compiler by adding compiler_config=TrainingCompilerConfig() as a parameter to the TensorFlow estimator constructor1.

Managed spot training is another feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for training your machine learning models. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various fault-tolerant and flexible applications. You can enable managed spot training by setting the use_spot_instances parameter to True and specifying the max_wait and max_run parameters in the TensorFlow estimator constructor2.

The TensorFlow estimator is a class in the SageMaker Python SDK that allows you to train and deploy TensorFlow models on SageMaker. You can use the TensorFlow estimator to run your own Python script on SageMaker, without any modification. You can pass the script to the estimator in the call to the TensorFlow fit() method, along with the location of your input data. The fit() method starts a SageMaker training job and runs your script as the entry point in the training containers3.

The other options are either less cost-effective or more complex to implement. Adjusting the training script to use distributed data parallelism would require modifying the script and specifying appropriate values for the distribution parameter, which could increase the development time and complexity. Setting the MaxWaitTimeInSeconds parameter to be equal to the MaxRuntimeInSeconds parameter would not reduce the cost, as it would only specify the maximum duration of the training job, regardless of the instance type.

1: Optimize TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet models for deployment using Amazon SageMaker Training Compiler | AWS Machine Learning Blog

2: Managed Spot Training: Save Up to 90% On Your Amazon SageMaker Training Jobs | AWS Machine Learning Blog

3: sagemaker.tensorflow — sagemaker 2.66.0 documentation

Parquet is a columnar storage format that can store data in a compressed and efficient way. Parquet files can improve query performance by reducing the amount of data that needs to be scanned, as only the relevant columns are read from the files. Parquet files can also support predicate pushdown, which means that the filtering conditions are applied at the storage level, further reducing the data that needs to be processed. Parquet files are compatible with Amazon Athena, which can leverage the benefits of the columnar format and provide faster and cheaper queries. Therefore, the records should be stored in Parquet files in Amazon S3 to improve query performance.

Columnar Storage Formats - Amazon Athena

Parquet SerDe - Amazon Athena

Optimizing Amazon Athena Queries - Amazon Athena

Parquet - Apache Software Foundation

The correct combination of actions to enable the data scientist’s IAM user to invoke the SageMaker endpoint is B, C, and E, because they ensure that the IAM user has the necessary permissions, access, and syntax to query the ML model from Athena. These actions have the following benefits:

B: Including a policy statement for the IAM user that allows the sagemaker:InvokeEndpoint action grants the IAM user the permission to call the SageMaker Runtime InvokeEndpoint API, which is used to get inferences from the model hosted at the endpoint1.

C: Including an inline policy for the IAM user that allows SageMaker to read S3 objects enables the IAM user to access the data stored in S3, which is the source of the Athena queries2.

E: Including the SQL statement “USING EXTERNAL FUNCTION ml_function_name” in the Athena SQL query allows the IAM user to invoke the ML model as an external function from Athena, which is a feature that enables querying ML models from SQL statements3.

The other options are not correct or necessary, because they have the following drawbacks:

A: Attaching the AmazonAthenaFullAccess AWS managed policy to the user identity is not sufficient, because it does not grant the IAM user the permission to invoke the SageMaker endpoint, which is required to query the ML model4.

D: Including a policy statement for the IAM user that allows the IAM user to perform the sagemaker:GetRecord action is not relevant, because this action is used to retrieve a single record from a feature group, which is not the case in this scenario5.

F: Performing a user remapping in SageMaker to map the IAM user to another IAM user that is on the hosted endpoint is not applicable, because this feature is only available for multi-model endpoints, which are not used in this scenario.

1: InvokeEndpoint - Amazon SageMaker

2: Querying Data in Amazon S3 from Amazon Athena - Amazon Athena

3: Querying machine learning models from Amazon Athena using Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

4: AmazonAthenaFullAccess - AWS Identity and Access Management

5: GetRecord - Amazon SageMaker Feature Store Runtime

[Invoke a Multi-Model Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker]

Regularization is a technique that can be used to prevent overfitting and improve model performance on unseen data. Overfitting occurs when the model learns the training data too well and fails to generalize to new and unseen data. This can be seen in the question, where the validation accuracy is lower than the training accuracy, and both are lower than the human-level performance. Regularization is a way of adding some constraints or penalties to the model to reduce its complexity and prevent it from memorizing the training data. Some common forms of regularization for image classification are:

Weight decay: Adding a term to the loss function that penalizes large weights in the model. This can help reduce the variance and noise in the model and make it more robust to small changes in the input.

Dropout: Randomly dropping out some units or connections in the model during training. This can help reduce the co-dependency among the units and make the model more resilient to missing or corrupted features.

Data augmentation: Artificially increasing the size and diversity of the training data by applying random transformations, such as cropping, flipping, rotating, scaling, etc. This can help the model learn more invariant and generalizable features and reduce the risk of overfitting to specific patterns in the training data.

The other options are not likely to fix the issue of overfitting, and may even worsen it:

A longer training time: This can lead to more overfitting, as the model will have more chances to fit the noise and details in the training data that are not relevant for the validation data.

Making the network larger: This can increase the model capacity and complexity, which can also lead to more overfitting, as the model will have more parameters to learn and adjust to the training data.

Using a different optimizer: This can affect the speed and stability of the training process, but not necessarily the generalization ability of the model. The choice of optimizer depends on the characteristics of the data and the model, and there is no guarantee that a different optimizer will prevent overfitting.

Regularization (machine learning)

Image Classification: Regularization

How to Reduce Overfitting With Dropout Regularization in Keras

To build a conversational interface that can use natural language to get data from the reports, the company can use a combination of services that can handle both written and spoken inputs, understand the user’s intent and query, and extract the relevant information from the reports. The services that can be used for this purpose are:

Amazon Lex: A service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex can create chatbots that can interact with users using natural language, and integrate with other AWS services such as Amazon Connect, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe. Amazon Lex can also use lambda functions to implement the business logic and fulfill the user’s requests.

Amazon Comprehend: A service for natural language processing and text analytics. Amazon Comprehend can analyze text and speech inputs and extract insights such as entities, key phrases, sentiment, syntax, and topics. Amazon Comprehend can also use custom classifiers and entity recognizers to identify specific terms and concepts that are relevant to the domain of the reports.

Amazon Transcribe: A service for speech-to-text conversion. Amazon Transcribe can transcribe audio inputs into text outputs, and add punctuation and formatting. Amazon Transcribe can also use custom vocabularies and language models to improve the accuracy and quality of the transcription for the specific domain of the reports.

Therefore, the company can use the following architecture to build the conversational interface:

Use Amazon Lex to create a chatbot that can accept both written and spoken inputs from the executives. The chatbot can use intents, utterances, and slots to capture the user’s query and parameters, such as the report name, date, metric, or filter.

Use Amazon Transcribe to convert the spoken inputs into text outputs, and pass them to Amazon Lex. Amazon Transcribe can use a custom vocabulary and language model to recognize the terms and concepts related to the reports.

Use Amazon Comprehend to analyze the text inputs and outputs, and extract the relevant information from the reports. Amazon Comprehend can use a custom classifier and entity recognizer to identify the report name, date, metric, or filter from the user’s query, and the corresponding data from the reports.

Use a lambda function to implement the business logic and fulfillment of the user’s query, such as retrieving the data from the reports, performing calculations or aggregations, and formatting the response. The lambda function can also handle errors and validations, and provide feedback to the user.

Use Amazon Lex to return the response to the user, either in text or speech format, depending on the user’s preference.

What Is Amazon Lex?

What Is Amazon Comprehend?

What Is Amazon Transcribe?

The combination of actions that will meet the requirements with the least operational overhead is to use SageMaker Clarify to automatically detect data bias and to configure SageMaker Data Wrangler to generate a bias report. SageMaker Clarify is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that provides machine learning (ML) developers with tools to gain greater insights into their ML training data and models. SageMaker Clarify can detect potential bias during data preparation, after model training, and in your deployed model. For instance, you can check for bias related to age in your dataset or in your trained model and receive a detailed report that quantifies different types of potential bias1. SageMaker Data Wrangler is another feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to prepare data for machine learning (ML) quickly and easily. You can use SageMaker Data Wrangler to identify potential bias during data preparation without having to write your own code. You specify input features, such as gender or age, and SageMaker Data Wrangler runs an analysis job to detect potential bias in those features. SageMaker Data Wrangler then provides a visual report with a description of the metrics and measurements of potential bias so that you can identify steps to remediate the bias2. The other actions either require more customization (such as using SageMaker Model Monitor or SageMaker Experiments) or do not meet the requirement of detecting data bias (such as using SageMaker Ground Truth). References:

1: Bias Detection and Model Explainability – Amazon Web Services

2: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – Amazon Web Services

 The F1 score is a measure of the harmonic mean of precision and recall, which are both important for fraud detection. Precision is the ratio of true positives to all predicted positives, and recall is the ratio of true positives to all actual positives. A high F1 score indicates that the classifier can correctly identify fraudulent transactions and avoid false negatives. The true positive rate is another name for recall, and it measures the proportion of fraudulent transactions that are correctly detected by the classifier. A high true positive rate means that the classifier can capture as many fraudulent transactions as possible.

Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning | Implementations | AWS Solutions

Detect fraudulent transactions using machine learning with Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

1. Introduction — Reproducible Machine Learning for Credit Card Fraud Detection