Free Amazon Web Services MLS-C01 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 9

The solution C will meet the requirements because it uses Amazon SageMaker Spot Instances, which are unused EC2 instances that are available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. Amazon SageMaker Spot Instances can speed up training and lower costs by taking advantage of the spare EC2 capacity. The company does not need to make any code changes to use Spot Instances, as it can simply enable the managed spot training option in the SageMaker training job configuration. The company also does not need to implement model checkpoints, as it is using only one epoch for training, which means the model will not resume from a previous state1.

The other options are not suitable because:

Option A: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use Pipe mode instead of File mode will not speed up training or lower costs significantly. Pipe mode is a data ingestion mode that streams data directly from S3 to the training algorithm, without copying the data to the local storage of the training instance. Pipe mode can reduce the startup time of the training job and the disk space usage, but it does not affect the computation time or the instance price. Moreover, Pipe mode may require some code changes to handle the streaming data, depending on the training algorithm2.

Option B: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use FastFile mode instead of File mode will not speed up training or lower costs significantly. FastFile mode is a data ingestion mode that copies data from S3 to the local storage of the training instance in parallel with the training process. FastFile mode can reduce the startup time of the training job and the disk space usage, but it does not affect the computation time or the instance price. Moreover, FastFile mode is only available for distributed training jobs that use multiple instances, which is not the case for the company3.

Option D: Configuring the SageMaker training job to use Spot Instances and implementing model checkpoints will not meet the requirements without the need to make any code changes. Model checkpoints are a feature that allows the training job to save the model state periodically to S3, and resume from the latest checkpoint if the training job is interrupted. Model checkpoints can help to avoid losing the training progress and ensure the model convergence, but they require some code changes to implement the checkpointing logic and the resuming logic4.

1: Managed Spot Training - Amazon SageMaker

2: Pipe Mode - Amazon SageMaker

3: FastFile Mode - Amazon SageMaker

4: Checkpoints - Amazon SageMaker

The machine learning model in this scenario shows signs of overfitting, as evidenced by better performance on the training dataset than on the testing dataset. Overfitting indicates that the model is capturing noise or details specific to the training data rather than general patterns.

One common approach to reduce overfitting is L2 regularization, which adds a penalty to the loss function for large weights and helps the model generalize better by smoothing out the weight distribution. By increasing the value of the L2 hyperparameter, the ML specialist can increase this penalty, helping to mitigate overfitting and improve performance on the testing dataset.

Options like increasing momentum or reducing dropout are less effective for addressing overfitting in this context.

The Hyperband tuning strategy is a multi-fidelity based tuning strategy that dynamically reallocates resources to the most promising hyperparameter configurations. Hyperband uses both intermediate and final results of training jobs to stop under-performing jobs and reallocate epochs to well-utilized hyperparameter configurations. Hyperband can provide up to three times faster hyperparameter tuning compared to other strategies1. Setting a lower value for the MaxNumberOfTrainingJobs parameter can also reduce the computation time for the hyperparameter tuning job by limiting the number of training jobs that the tuning job can launch. This can help avoid unnecessary or redundant training jobs that do not improve the objective metric.

The other options are not effective ways to reduce the computation time for the hyperparameter tuning job. Increasing the number of hyperparameters will increase the complexity and dimensionality of the search space, which can result in longer computation time and lower performance. Using the grid search tuning strategy will also increase the computation time, as grid search methodically searches through every combination of hyperparameter values, which can be very expensive and inefficient for large search spaces. Setting a lower value for the MaxParallelTrainingJobs parameter will reduce the number of training jobs that can run in parallel, which can slow down the tuning process and increase the waiting time.

The best option is to use Amazon SageMaker Studio to rebuild the model and deploy it at an endpoint. Then, use Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to store inferences and use the inferences to create Shapley values that help explain model behavior. Shapley values are a way of attributing the contribution of each feature to the model output. They can help the credit team understand why the model makes certain decisions and how the features affect the model outcomes. A chart that shows features and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values can be created using the SHAP library in Python. This option is the most operationally efficient because it leverages the existing XGBoost training container and the built-in capabilities of Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and SHAP library. References:

Amazon SageMaker Studio

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

SHAP library

To log Amazon SageMaker API calls, the team can use AWS CloudTrail, which is a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service in SageMaker1. CloudTrail captures all API calls for SageMaker, with the exception of InvokeEndpoint and InvokeEndpointAsync, as events1. The calls captured include calls from the SageMaker console and code calls to the SageMaker API operations1. The team can create a trail to enable continuous delivery of CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket, and configure other AWS services to further analyze and act upon the event data collected in CloudTrail logs1. The auditors can view the CloudTrail log activity report in the CloudTrail console or download the log files from the S3 bucket1.

To receive a notification when the model is overfitting, the team can add code to push a custom metric to Amazon CloudWatch, which is a service that provides monitoring and observability for AWS resources and applications2. The team can use the MXNet metric API to define and compute the custom metric, such as the validation accuracy or the validation loss, and use the boto3 CloudWatch client to put the metric data to CloudWatch3 . The team can then create an alarm in CloudWatch with Amazon SNS to receive a notification when the custom metric crosses a threshold that indicates overfitting . For example, the team can set the alarm to trigger when the validation loss increases for a certain number of consecutive periods, which means the model is learning the noise in the training data and not generalizing well to the validation data.

1: Log Amazon SageMaker API Calls with AWS CloudTrail - Amazon SageMaker

2: What Is Amazon CloudWatch? - Amazon CloudWatch

3: Metric API — Apache MXNet documentation

CloudWatch — Boto 3 Docs 1.20.21 documentation

Creating Amazon CloudWatch Alarms - Amazon CloudWatch

What is Amazon Simple Notification Service? - Amazon Simple Notification Service

Overfitting and Underfitting - Machine Learning Crash Course

 The problem of detecting specific types of weeds and their location within the field is an example of object detection, which is a type of machine learning model that identifies and localizes objects in an image. Amazon SageMaker provides a built-in object detection algorithm that uses a single-shot multibox detector (SSD) to perform real-time inference on streaming images. The SSD algorithm can handle multiple objects of varying sizes and scales in an image, and generate bounding boxes and scores for each object category. Therefore, option C is the best approach to obtain accurate predictions.

Option A is incorrect because image classification is a type of machine learning model that assigns a label to an image based on predefined categories. Image classification is not suitable for localizing objects within an image, as it does not provide bounding boxes or scores for each object. Option B is incorrect because Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format that is optimized for analytical queries. Apache Parquet is not suitable for storing images, as it does not preserve the spatial information of the pixels. Option D is incorrect because it combines the wrong format (Apache Parquet) and the wrong algorithm (image classification) for the given problem, as explained in options A and B.

Object Detection algorithm now available in Amazon SageMaker

Image classification and object detection using Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart

Object Detection with Amazon SageMaker - W3Schools

aws-samples/amazon-sagemaker-tensorflow-object-detection-api

 The best solution for implementing the testing model with the least amount of operational overhead is to use the following steps:

Update the DesiredWeightsAndCapacity data type with the new version of the model by using the UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities operation with the DesiredWeight parameter set to 0. This operation allows the developers to update the variant weights and capacities of an existing SageMaker endpoint without deleting and recreating the endpoint. Setting the DesiredWeight parameter to 0 means that the new version of the model will not receive any traffic initially1

Specify the TargetVariant parameter for InvokeEndpoint calls for users who subscribed to the preview feature. This parameter allows the developers to override the variant weights and direct a request to a specific variant. This way, the developers can test the new version of the model for a limited number of users who opted in for the preview feature2

When the new version of the model is ready for release, gradually increase DesiredWeight until all users have the updated version. This operation allows the developers to perform a gradual rollout of the new version of the model and monitor its performance and accuracy. The developers can adjust the variant weights and capacities as needed until the new version of the model serves all the traffic1

The other options are incorrect because they either require more operational overhead or do not support the desired use cases. For example:

Option A uses the CreateEndpointConfig operation with the InitialVariantWeight parameter set to 0. This operation creates a new endpoint configuration, which requires deleting and recreating the endpoint to apply the changes. This adds extra overhead and downtime for the endpoint. It also does not support the gradual rollout of the new version of the model3

Option B uses two SageMaker hosted endpoints that serve the different versions of the model and an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to route traffic to both endpoints based on the TargetVariant query string parameter. This option requires creating and managing additional resources and services, such as the second endpoint and the ALB. It also requires changing the app code to send the query string parameter for the preview feature4

Option D uses the access key and secret key of the IAM user with appropriate KMS and ECR permissions. This is not a secure way to pass credentials to the Processing job. It also requires the ML specialist to manage the IAM user and the keys.

1: UpdateEndpointWeightsAndCapacities - Amazon SageMaker

2: InvokeEndpoint - Amazon SageMaker

3: CreateEndpointConfig - Amazon SageMaker

4: Application Load Balancer - Elastic Load Balancing