AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty 2024 - Hands On!

Download the notebooks you'll need throughout the hands-on labs in this course.

Reinforce your knowledge of some key points in this section.

High-level overview of how Jupyter notebooks, Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Seaborn, and scikit-learn play a role in exploratory data analysis and preparing your training data for machine learning.

We'll walk through a Jupyter notebook that explores, cleans, and normalizes training data to build a real machine learning model to predict if mammogram results are benign or malignant.

We'll cover the differences between numerical, categorical, and ordinal data.

Topics covered include normal distributions, Poisson distributions, binomial distributions, Bernoulli distributions, and the difference between probability density functions and probability mass functions.

We'll talk about how time series data consists of separate signals from trends, seasonality, and noise.

A quick overview of Amazon Athena, and how it can be used to query your unstructured, structured, or semi-structured data in S3 in a serverless setting.

High-level features of QuickSight, Amazon's data visualization product, including its new machine learning capabilities.

There are lots of visualization choices; bar and line graphs, heat maps, tree maps, pivot tables, and much more - all of which are offered by QuickSight. Let's talk about how to decide which kind of graph is most appropriate for illustrating different aspects of your data.

How Amazon EMR works, including how a Hadoop cluster's architecture works. What is HDFS and EMRFS? What are different usage modes for EMR? How does it scale? What can it do?

How Apache Spark has supplanted MapReduce; the architecture of Spark, and its capabilities, including Spark Streaming, MLLib, GraphX, and Spark SQL. How Spark integrates with AWS and Kinesis.

Zeppelin notebooks run on your EMR cluster to control Spark, but EMR notebooks can run outside of your cluster and control the provisioning of the cluster itself, too. We'll also discuss the security features available with EMR, and how to choose an instance type for the master, core, and task nodes of your cluster.

We'll introduce what the world of feature engineering is all about, and why it is so important to getting good results from your machine learning models. And, we'll dive into the "curse of dimensionality," and why more features usually isn't better.

A big part of feature engineering is dealing with missing data. We'll discuss various approaches, including mean imputation, dropping, and using machine learning for imputation including KNN, deep learning, and regression methods such as MICE.

Training models with highly unbalanced data sets - such as in fraud detection, where very few observations are actual fraud, is a big problem. We'll talk about ways to address this from a feature engineering standpoint, including oversampling, undersampling, and SMOTE.

We'll introduce how to compute variance and standard deviation, and how to identify outliers as a function of standard deviation and in box-and-whisker plots. We'll also give a shout-out to Amazon's Random Cut Forest algorithm.

We'll round out our tour of feature engineering with a discussion of binning numerical data, transforming data to create new features to discover sub-linear and super-linear patterns, one-hot encoding, scaling and normalization, and the importance of shuffling your training data.

Humans can be the most important tool for creating missing data, especially labels. We'll talk about how Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth manages human labeling tasks and optimizes them, as well as using unsupervised techniques such as Rekognition and Comprehend to fabricate features and labels from existing data.

As TF-IDF (Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) may be new to you, we'll start by reviewing how TF-IDF works and how it fits into a search engine solution.

We'll walk through the process of creating an JupyterLab PySpark Notebook within an EMR Workspace, backed by an EMR EC2 cluster, within a EMR Studio environment. We'll use this notebook to pre-process real Wikipedia data, build a TF/IDF model around it, and use it for actual search.

Let's do a quick knowledge check of what you've learned in the exploratory data analysis domain. These aren't the sorts of questions you'll get on the exam; it's just for review purposes.

We'll cover the biological inspiration of deep learning, and how this translates to artificial neural networks.

We'll dive deep into activation functions, including linear, step, logistic / sigmoid, hyperbolic tangent, ReLU, Leaky ReLu, PReLu, Swish, and more - and how to choose between them.

Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNN's, are inspired by the human visual cortex and are useful for object recognition and other tasks. We'll cover how they work, some popular CNN architectures such as ResNet, and how CNN's are built in Keras and Tensorflow.

Recurrent Neural Networks, or RNN's, are well suited for problems involving sequences of data, such as predicting markets or machine translation. We'll cover how RNN's work, some popular variants included LSTM and GRU, and different applications of them.

A brief discussion of EMR's built-in support for deep learning with Apache MXNet, deep learning AMI's for EC2, and EC2 instance types appropriate for deep learning.

Hyperparameter tuning of deep neural networks is a complex subject. We'll talk about how deep neural nets are trained with gradient descent, and how your choice of learning rate and batch size affects your training. Sometimes it's counter-intuitive!

Deep neural networks are prone to overfitting. We'll cover some simple regularization techniques to combat this, including dropout, early stopping, and simply using a smaller network.

What is L1 and L2 regularization, how do they differ, and how do you choose between them?

What is the vanishing gradient problem, and what can be done to combat it? Also, what's gradient checking?

How to read and interpret various kinds of confusion matrices, allowing you to distinguish true and false positives and negatives from an overall accuracy metric.

We'll cover various ways to measure classifiers, including precision, recall, ROC curves, F1, RMSE, and AUC. We'll discuss how to interpret these metrics, and how to decide which one is relevant to the problem you're trying to solve.

Two ensemble methods are bagging and boosting, and they solve very different problems.

The heart of AWS's machine learning offering is SageMaker. We'll cover what it does and its architecture at a high level, and how it's used together with ECR and S3.

The Linear Learner algorithm in SageMaker is a robust means of regression or classification in systems that can be described in a linear manner.

The XGBoost algorithm is winning a lot of Kaggle competitions lately; if you care about accuracy, it's a great choice. SageMaker includes the open source XGBoost algorithm; we'll cover what it does, how to use it, and how to tune it.

The Seq2Seq algorithm is commonly used for machine translation tasks. It is implemented as an RNN or CNN with attention under the hood.

DeepAR is a powerful RNN-based model for extrapolating time series, and sets of related time series, into the future.

BlazingText can operate in supervised mode to assign labels to sentences, or in Word2Vec mode to build an embedding layer of related words.

Object2Vec is a general mechanism for building embeddings of objects based on arbitrary pairs of data.

The Object Detection algorithm identifies objects in images, together with their bounding boxes.

Image Classification is used to identify what objects are in an image, but without data on where those objects are within the image.

Semantic Segmentation identifies objects within images at a per-pixel level, using segmentation masks.

Random Cut Forest is Amazon's algorithm for anomaly detection in a series of data.

Neural Topic Modeling is a neural network-based technique for clustering documents into a specific number of topics, in an unsupervised manner.

LDA is another topic modeling technique in SageMaker that does not rely on neural networks, but just looks at commonalities in the terms contained by documents.

KNN is a simple method for classification or regression by just analyzing the K observations most similar to a new observation.

Factorization Machines are generally used for classification or regression of sparse data, for example in recommender systems.

IP Insights uses deep learning to identify anomalous behavior from IP addresses in your web log data.