Free Amazon Web Services MLA-C01 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 3

AWS recommends Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor for detecting data drift and model drift in deployed models. Model Monitor works by comparing live inference data against a baseline, which must first be created from the training dataset.

AWS documentation clearly specifies the required order:

Create a baseline using training data statistics

Create a monitoring schedule to compare incoming data against the baseline

Option A reverses this order and is therefore incorrect. Option C is incorrect because SageMaker Clarify focuses on bias and explainability, not ongoing drift detection. Option D is reactive and does not provide continuous monitoring.

Model Monitor integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, enabling automated alerts and downstream retraining workflows. This proactive approach allows companies to detect degradation early and maintain model quality.

Therefore, Option B is the correct and AWS-verified answer.

Recall measures the ability of a model to correctly identify all positive cases (true positives) out of all actual positives, minimizing false negatives. Since the cost of false negatives is much higher than false positives in this scenario, the ML engineer should prioritize models with high recall to reduce the likelihood of missing positive cases.

The SageMaker Canvas user needs permissions to access the Amazon S3 bucket where the model artifacts are stored to retrieve the model for use in Canvas.

Registering the model in the SageMaker Model Registry allows the model to be tracked and managed within the SageMaker ecosystem. This makes it accessible for tuning and deployment through SageMaker Canvas.

This combination ensures proper access control and integration within SageMaker, enabling the Canvas user to work with the model.

Amazon Comprehend provides pre-built functionality for key phrase extraction and can identify meaningful keywords from documents with minimal setup or operational overhead. It eliminates the need for manual preprocessing, stemming, or stop-word removal and does not require custom model development or infrastructure management. This makes it the most efficient and low-maintenance solution for the task.

For cross-account Amazon S3 access, AWS requires two components:

An S3 bucket policy in the owning account (Account A) that grants access to a principal in another account

An IAM role policy in the consuming account (Account B) that allows the service to access the bucket

Amazon SageMaker training jobs assume an IAM role in the account where the job runs—in this case, Account B. Therefore, the IAM policy must be attached to the SageMaker execution role in Account B.

The S3 bucket policy must reside in Account A because bucket policies are owned and enforced by the bucket owner. This policy explicitly allows the IAM role from Account B to read the training data.

Any other combination fails either because the policy is in the wrong account or because the role is not the one used by SageMaker.

AWS documentation clearly describes this pattern as the correct way to grant cross-account access for SageMaker training jobs.

Therefore, Option B is the correct and AWS-aligned solution.

The key requirement in this scenario is detecting customer intent without having any training data. According to AWS Machine Learning and Generative AI documentation, zero-shot learning is specifically designed for situations where labeled training data is unavailable. Zero-shot learning allows a pre-trained large language model (LLM) to perform tasks it has not been explicitly trained on by leveraging its general knowledge and language understanding.

Amazon Bedrock provides fully managed access to foundation models (FMs) and LLMs that support zero-shot and few-shot learning. By using an LLM from Amazon Bedrock, the company can directly infer customer intent from natural language inputs without building, training, or fine-tuning a custom model. This approach is ideal for conversational interfaces where rapid deployment and scalability are required.

Option A is incorrect because fine-tuning a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart still requires labeled training data. Since the company explicitly does not have training data, this option does not meet the requirement.

Option C is also incorrect because the Amazon Comprehend DetectEntities API is designed for named entity recognition (NER), such as detecting names, dates, locations, or monetary values. It does not perform intent detection and is not suitable for conversational AI intent classification.

Option D is partially misleading. While it is technically possible to run an LLM on Amazon EC2, this does not inherently solve the problem of intent detection without training data. Additionally, Amazon Bedrock already abstracts infrastructure management, scaling, and model hosting, making direct EC2 deployment unnecessary and less efficient.

Therefore, using an LLM from Amazon Bedrock with zero-shot learning is the most appropriate, scalable, and AWS-recommended solution for intent detection without training data.

Class imbalance occurs when one class significantly outnumbers another, causing models to bias predictions toward the majority class. In this case, images without defects (1,800) vastly outnumber images with defects (200). AWS ML best practices recommend oversampling the minority class to improve class representation without discarding valuable data.

Oversampling techniques—such as duplicating minority samples or applying data augmentation—help the model better learn defect-related features. This approach preserves all available data and improves recall and precision for underrepresented defect classes.

Option B is incorrect because undersampling the minority class would further worsen imbalance. Option A unnecessarily reduces dataset size. Option D does not address the imbalance problem.

Thus, oversampling defect images is the correct solution.

When predicting continuous variables, such as apartment prices, it's essential to evaluate the model's performance using appropriate regression metrics. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE) is a widely used metric for this purpose.

Understanding Mean Absolute Error (MAE):

MAE measures the average magnitude of errors in a set of predictions, without considering their direction. It calculates the average absolute difference between predicted values and actual values, providing a straightforward interpretation of prediction accuracy.

Advantages of MAE:

Interpretability: MAE is expressed in the same units as the target variable, making it easy to understand.

Robustness to Outliers: Unlike metrics that square the errors (e.g., Mean Squared Error), MAE does not disproportionately penalize larger errors, making it more robust to outliers.

Comparison with Other Metrics:

Accuracy, AUC, F1 Score: These metrics are designed for classification tasks, where the goal is to predict discrete labels. They are not suitable for regression problems involving continuous target variables.

Mean Squared Error (MSE): While MSE also measures prediction errors, it squares the differences, giving more weight to larger errors. This can be useful in certain contexts but may be sensitive to outliers.

Conclusion:

For evaluating the performance of a model predicting apartment prices—a continuous variable—MAE is an appropriate and effective metric. It provides a clear indication of the average prediction error in the same units as the target variable, facilitating straightforward interpretation and comparison.

This requirement combines asynchronous inference on large datasets with automated data quality monitoring and alerting. AWS documentation explicitly recommends Amazon SageMaker batch transform for large-scale, asynchronous inference workloads. Batch transform jobs process large datasets stored in Amazon S3 without requiring a persistent endpoint, making them cost-effective and scalable.

For data quality monitoring, Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor is the AWS-native solution. Model Monitor can be scheduled to analyze inference data, compare it against a baseline, and detect data quality issues such as missing values, schema changes, or statistical drift. When violations occur, Model Monitor emits metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, where alarms can trigger alerts.

Options A, B, and C lack ML-aware data quality monitoring capabilities. AWS Glue and Batch are not designed for model data quality analysis, and CloudTrail tracks API activity—not data quality.

AWS best practices clearly position Batch Transform + Model Monitor as the correct architecture for asynchronous inference with automated monitoring and alerting.

Therefore, Option D is the correct and AWS-verified solution.

Logistic regression is a suitable modeling approach for this requirement because it is designed for binary classification problems, such as predicting whether a customer will require long-term support ("yes" or "no"). It calculates the probability of a particular class and is widely used for tasks like this where the outcome is categorical.