B.   Train an Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm to forecast demand for the new product

Explanation:
The company wants to predict the demand for a new product that will soon be launched, based on the sales history of similar products. This is a time series forecasting problem, which requires a machine learning algorithm that can learn from historical data and generate future predictions.
One of the most suitable solutions for this problem is to use the Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm, which is a supervised learning algorithm for forecasting scalar time series using recurrent neural networks (RNN). DeepAR can handle multiple related time series, such as the sales of different products, and learn a global model that captures the common patterns and trends across the time series. DeepAR can also generate probabilistic forecasts that provide confidence intervals and quantify the uncertainty of the predictions.
DeepAR can outperform traditional forecasting methods, such as ARIMA, especially when the dataset contains hundreds or thousands of related time series. DeepAR can also use the trained model to forecast the demand for new products that are similar to the ones it has been trained on, by using the categorical features that encode the product attributes. For example, the company can use the product type, brand, flavor, size, and price as categorical features to group the products and learn the typical behavior for each group.
Therefore, the Machine Learning Specialist should apply the Amazon SageMaker DeepAR algorithm to forecast the demand for the new product, by using the sales history of the existing products as the training dataset, and the product attributes as the categorical features.

B.   Classification

Explanation:
The goal of classification is to determine to which class or category a data point (customer in our case) belongs to. For classification problems, data scientists would use historical data with predefined target variables AKA labels (churner/non-churner) – answers that need to be predicted – to train an algorithm. With classification, businesses can answer the following questions:
Will this customer churn or not?
Will a customer renew their subscription?
Will a user downgrade a pricing plan?
Are there any signs of unusual customer behavior?

C.   Instead Of On-Demand Instances, configure the SageMaker training job to use Spot Instances. Make no Other changes.

Explanation: 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.

D.   Generate two RecordIO files, training rec and validation.rec. from the manifest files by using the im2rec Apache MXNet utility tool. Upload the RecordlO files to the training S3 bucket.

Explanation: The SageMaker image classification algorithm supports both RecordIO and image content types for training in file mode, and supports the RecordIO content type for training in pipe mode1. However, the algorithm also supports training in pipe mode using the image files without creating RecordIO files, by using the augmented manifest format2. In this case, the company should generate.

A.   Create a new endpoint configuration that includes a production variant for each of the two models.

E.   Update the existing endpoint to use the new endpoint configuration.

Explanation: The combination of steps that the data scientist must take to perform the A/B testing are to create a new endpoint configuration that includes a production variant for each of the two models, and update the existing endpoint to use the new endpoint configuration. This approach will allow the data scientist to deploy both models on the same endpoint and split the inference traffic between them based on a specified distribution.
Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides developers and data scientists the ability to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker supports A/B testing on machine learning models by allowing the data scientist to run multiple production variants on an endpoint. A production variant is a version of a model that is deployed on an endpoint. Each production variant has a name, a machine learning model, an instance type, an initial instance count, and an initial weight. The initial weight determines the percentage of inference requests that the variant will handle. For example, if there are two variants with weights of 0.5 and 0.5, each variant will handle 50% of the requests. The data scientist can use production variants to test models that have been trained using different training datasets, algorithms, and machine learning frameworks; test how they perform on different instance types; or a combination of all of the above1.
To perform A/B testing on machine learning models, the data scientist needs to create a new endpoint configuration that includes a production variant for each of the two models. An endpoint configuration is a collection of settings that define the properties of an endpoint, such as the name, the production variants, and the data capture configuration. The data scientist can use the Amazon SageMaker console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to create a new endpoint configuration. The data scientist needs to specify the name, model name, instance type, initial instance count, and initial variant weight for each production variant in the endpoint configuration2.
After creating the new endpoint configuration, the data scientist needs to update the existing endpoint to use the new endpoint configuration. Updating an endpoint is the process of deploying a new endpoint configuration to an existing endpoint. Updating an endpoint does not affect the availability or scalability of the endpoint, as Amazon SageMaker creates a new endpoint instance with the new configuration and switches the DNS record to point to the new instance when it is ready. The data scientist can use the Amazon SageMaker console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to update an endpoint. The data scientist needs to specify the name of the endpoint and the name of the new endpoint configuration to update the endpoint3.
The other options are either incorrect or unnecessary. Creating a new endpoint configuration that includes two target variants that point to different endpoints is not possible, as target variants are only used to invoke a specific variant on an endpoint, not to define an endpoint configuration. Deploying the new model to the existing endpoint would replace the existing model, not run it side-by-side with the new model. Updating the existing endpoint to activate the new model is not a valid operation, as there is no activation parameter for an endpoint.

A.   Create an AWS Lambda function that can transform the incoming records. Enable data transformation on the ingestion Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream. Use the Lambda function as the invocation target.

Explanation: The solution A will create the required transformed records with the least operational overhead because it uses AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which are fully managed services that can provide the desired functionality. The solution A involves the following steps:
Create an AWS Lambda function that can transform the incoming records. AWS Lambda is a service that can run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda can execute the transformation logic on the purchasing records and add the new attributes to the records1.
Enable data transformation on the ingestion Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream. Use the Lambda function as the invocation target. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service that can capture, transform, and load streaming data into AWS data stores. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can enable data transformation and invoke the Lambda function to process the incoming records before delivering them to Amazon S3. This can reduce the operational overhead of managing the transformation process and the data storage2.
The other options are not suitable because:
Option B: Deploying an Amazon EMR cluster that runs Apache Spark and includes the transformation logic, using Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) to schedule an AWS Lambda function to launch the cluster each day and transform the records that accumulate in Amazon S3, and delivering the transformed records to Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The company will have to manage the Amazon EMR cluster, the Apache Spark application, the AWS Lambda function, and the Amazon EventBridge rule. Moreover, this solution will introduce a delay in the transformation process, as it will run only once a day3.
Option C: Deploying an Amazon S3 File Gateway in the stores, updating the instore software to deliver data to the S3 File Gateway, and using a scheduled daily AWS Glue job to transform the data that the S3 File Gateway delivers to Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The company will have to manage the S3 File Gateway, the in-store software, and the AWS Glue job. Moreover, this solution will introduce a delay in the transformation process, as it will run only once a day4.
Option D: Launching a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that include the transformation logic, configuring the EC2 instances with a daily cron job to transform the records that accumulate in Amazon S3, and delivering the transformed records to Amazon S3 will incur more operational overhead than using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The company will have to manage the EC2 instances, the transformation code, and the cron job. Moreover, this solution will introduce a delay in the transformation process, as it will run only once a day5.

C.   Modify the security group on the endpoint network interface to restrict access to the instances.

E.   Add a SageMaker Runtime VPC endpoint interface to the VPC.

Explanation: To secure calls to the Amazon SageMaker Service API, the ML specialist should take the following steps:

• Modify the security group on the endpoint network interface to restrict access to the instances. This will allow the ML specialist to control which instances in the VPC can communicate with the VPC interface endpoint for the Amazon SageMaker Service API. The security group can specify inbound and outbound rules based on the instance IDs, IP addresses, or CIDR blocks1.
• Add a SageMaker Runtime VPC endpoint interface to the VPC. This will allow the ML specialist to invoke the SageMaker endpoints from within the VPC without using the public internet. The SageMaker Runtime VPC endpoint interface connects the VPC directly to the SageMaker Runtime using AWS PrivateLink2.

The other options are not as effective or necessary as the steps above. Adding a VPC endpoint policy to allow access to the IAM users is not required, as the IAM users can already access the Amazon SageMaker Service API through the VPC interface endpoint.
Modifying the users’ IAM policy to allow access to Amazon SageMaker Service API calls only is not sufficient, as it does not prevent unauthorized instances from accessing the VPC interface endpoint. Modifying the ACL on the endpoint network interface to restrict access to the instances is not possible, as network ACLs are associated with subnets, not network interfaces3.

B.   Correlation plot with heat maps

D.   Univariate selection

E.   Feature importance with a tree-based classifier

Explanation: Feature selection is the process of selecting a subset of extracted features that are relevant and contribute to minimizing the error rate of a trained model. Some techniques for feature selection are:

• Correlation plot with heat maps: This technique visualizes the correlation between features using a color-coded matrix. Features that are highly correlated with each other or with the target variable can be identified and removed to reduce redundancy and noise.
• Univariate selection: This technique evaluates each feature individually based on a statistical test, such as chi-square, ANOVA, or mutual information, and selects the features that have the highest scores or p-values. This technique is simple and fast, but it does not consider the interactions between features.
• Feature importance with a tree-based classifier: This technique uses a tree-based classifier, such as random forest or gradient boosting, to rank the features based on their importance in splitting the nodes. Features that have low importance scores can be dropped from the model. This technique can capture the non-linear relationships and interactions between features.

The other options are not techniques for feature selection, but rather for feature engineering, which is the process of creating, transforming, or extracting features from the original data. Feature engineering can improve the performance and interpretability of the model, but it does not reduce the number of features.

• Data scaling with standardization and normalization: This technique transforms the features to have a common scale, such as zero mean and unit variance, or a range between 0 and 1. This technique can help some algorithms, such as kmeans or logistic regression, to converge faster and avoid numerical instability, but it does not change the number of features.
• Data binning: This technique groups the continuous features into discrete bins or categories based on some criteria, such as equal width, equal frequency, or clustering. This technique can reduce the noise and outliers in the data, and also create ordinal or nominal features that can be used for some algorithms, such as decision trees or naive Bayes, but it does not reduce the number of features.
• Data augmentation: This technique generates new data from the existing data by applying some transformations, such as rotation, flipping, cropping, or noise addition. This technique can increase the size and diversity of the data, and help prevent overfitting, but it does not reduce the number of features.

D.   Using some form of regularization

Explanation: 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.

C.   Update the existing SageMaker endpoint to use a new configuration that is weighted to send 5% of the traffic to the new variant. Revert traffic to the last version by resetting the weights if the model does not perform as expected.

Explanation: Updating the existing SageMaker endpoint to use a new configuration that is weighted to send 5% of the traffic to the new variant is the simplest approach with the least risk to deploy the model and roll it back, if needed. This is because SageMaker supports A/B testing, which allows the Specialist to compare the performance of different model variants by sending a portion of the traffic to each variant. The Specialist can monitor the metrics of each variant and adjust the weights accordingly. If the new variant does not perform as expected, the Specialist can revert traffic to the last version by resetting the weights to 100% for the old variant and 0% for the new variant. This way, the Specialist can deploy the model without affecting the customer experience and roll it back easily if needed.

B.   Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Skip-gram mode

E.   Combination of the Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Batch Skip-gram mode with a custom recurrent neural network (RNN)

Explanation:
To capture word context and sequential QA information, the embedding vectors need to consider both the order and the meaning of the words in the text. Option B, Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Skip-gram mode, is a valid option because it can learn word embeddings that capture the semantic similarity and syntactic relations between words based on their co-occurrence in a window of words. Skip-gram mode can also handle rare words better than continuous bagof- words (CBOW) mode1.
Option E, combination of the Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in Batch Skip-gram mode with a custom recurrent neural network (RNN), is another valid option because it can leverage the advantages of Skip-gram mode and also use an RNN to model the sequential nature of the text. An RNN can capture the temporal dependencies and long-term dependencies between words, which are important for QA tasks2.
Option A, Amazon SageMaker seq2seq algorithm, is not a valid option because it is designed for sequence-to-sequence tasks such as machine translation, summarization, or chatbots. It does not produce embedding vectors for text series, but rather generates an output sequence given an input sequence3.
Option C, Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec algorithm, is not a valid option because it is designed for learning embeddings for pairs of objects, such as text-image, text-text, or image-image. It does not produce embedding vectors for text series, but rather learns a similarity function between pairs of objects4.
Option D, Amazon SageMaker BlazingText algorithm in continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) mode, is not a valid option because it does not capture word context as well as Skip-gram mode. CBOW mode predicts a word given its surrounding words, while Skip-gram mode predicts the surrounding words given a word. CBOW mode is faster and more suitable for frequent words, but Skip-gram mode can learn more meaningful embeddings for rare words1.

C.   Recall = 0.92 Precision = 0.8

Explanation: Recall and precision are two metrics that can be used to evaluate the performance of a classification model. Recall is the ratio of true positives to the total number of actual positives, which measures how well the model can identify all the relevant cases. Precision is the ratio of true positives to the total number of predicted positives, which measures how accurate the model is when it makes a positive prediction. Based on the confusion matrix in the image, we can calculate the recall and precision as follows:

• Recall = TP / (TP + FN) = 12 / (12 + 1) = 0.92
• Precision = TP / (TP + FP) = 12 / (12 + 3) = 0.8

Where TP is the number of true positives, FN is the number of false negatives, and FP is the number of false positives. Therefore, the recall and precision of the model are 0.92 and 0.8, respectively.