Explanation: Feature selection is the process of reducing the number of input variables to those that are most relevant for predicting the target variable. One way to do this is to run a correlation check of all features against the target variable and remove features with low target variable correlation scores. This means that these features have little or no linear relationship with the target variable and are not useful for the prediction. This can reduce the model’s complexity and improve its performance.

Explanation: Word embeddings are a type of dense representation of words, which encode semantic meaning in a vector form. These embeddings are typically pre-trained on a large corpus of text data, such as a large set of books, news articles, or web pages, and capture the context in which words are used. Word embeddings can be used as features for a nearest neighbor model, which can be used to find words used in similar contexts. Downloading pre-trained word embeddings is a good way to get started quickly and leverage the strengths of these representations, which have been optimized on a large amount of data. This is likely to result in more accurate and reliable features than other options like one-hot encoding, edit distance, or using Amazon Mechanical Turk to produce synonyms.

Explanation: The best architecture to scale the solution at the lowest cost is to implement the solution using AWS Deep Learning Containers and run the container as a job using AWS Batch on a GPU-compatible Spot Instance. This option has the following advantages:

• AWS Deep Learning Containers: These are Docker images that are pre-installed and optimized with popular deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet. They can be easily deployed on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate. They can also be integrated with AWS Batch to run containerized batch jobs. Using AWS Deep Learning Containers can simplify the setup and configuration of the deep learning environment and reduce the complexity of the resource management.
• AWS Batch: This is a fully managed service that enables you to run batch computing workloads on AWS. You can define compute environments, job queues, and job definitions to run your batch jobs. You can also use AWS Batch to automatically provision compute resources based on the requirements of the batch jobs. You can specify the type and quantity of the compute resources, such as GPU instances, and the maximum price you are willing to pay for them. You can also use AWS Batch to monitor the status and progress of your batch jobs and handle any failures or interruptions.
• GPU-compatible Spot Instance: This is an Amazon EC2 instance that uses a spare compute capacity that is available at a lower price than the On-Demand price. You can use Spot Instances to run your deep learning training jobs at a lower cost, as long as you are flexible about when your instances run and how long they run. You can also use Spot Instances with AWS Batch to automatically launch and terminate instances based on the availability and price of the Spot capacity. You can also use Spot Instances with Amazon EBS volumes to store your datasets, checkpoints, and logs, and attach them to your instances when they are launched. This way, you can preserve your data and resume your training even if your instances are interrupted.

Explanation: The solution A will meet the requirements with the least amount of effort from the internal team because it uses Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels, which are fully managed services that can provide the desired functionality. The solution A involves the following steps:

• Set up a private workforce that consists of the internal team. Use the private workforce and the SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature to label the data. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth is a service that can create high-quality training datasets for machine learning by using human labelers. A private workforce is a group of labelers that the company can manage and control. The internal team can use the private workforce to label the satellite images as having solar panels or not. The SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature can reduce the labeling effort by using a machine learning model to automatically label the easy examples and only send the difficult ones to the human labelers1.
• Use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels for model training and hosting. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is a service that can train and deploy custom machine learning models for image analysis. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can use the labeled data from SageMaker Ground Truth to train a model that can detect solar panels in satellite images. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels can also host the model and provide an API endpoint for inference2.

• Option B: Setting up a private workforce that consists of the internal team, using the private workforce to label the data, and using Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels for model training and hosting will incur more effort from the internal team than using SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature. The internal team will have to label all the images manually, without the assistance of the machine learning model that can automate some of the labeling tasks1.
• Option C: Setting up a private workforce that consists of the internal team, using the private workforce and the SageMaker Ground Truth active learning feature to label the data, using the SageMaker Object Detection algorithm to train a model, and using SageMaker batch transform for inference will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels. The company will have to manage the SageMaker training job, the model artifact, and the batch transform job. Moreover, SageMaker batch transform is not suitable for real-time inference, as it processes the data in batches and stores the results in Amazon S33.
• Option D: Setting up a public workforce, using the public workforce to label the data, using the SageMaker Object Detection algorithm to train a model, and using SageMaker batch transform for inference will incur more operational overhead and cost than using a private workforce and Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels. A public workforce is a group of labelers from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace. The company will have to pay the public workforce for each labeling task, and it may not have full control over the quality and security of the labeled data. The company will also have to manage the SageMaker training job, the model artifact, and the batch transform job, as explained in option C4.

Explanation: A logarithmic transformation is a suitable data transformation for a linear regression model when the data has a skewed distribution, such as when the mode is lower than the median and the median is lower than the mean. A logarithmic transformation can reduce the skewness and make the data more symmetric and normally distributed, which are desirable properties for linear regression. A logarithmic transformation can also reduce the effect of outliers and heteroscedasticity (unequal variance) in the data. An exponential transformation would have the opposite effect of increasing the skewness and making the data more asymmetric. A polynomial transformation may not be able to capture the nonlinearity in the data and may introduce multicollinearity among the transformed variables. A sinusoidal transformation is not appropriate for data that does not have a periodic pattern.

Explanation:
Option A is correct because reducing the number of features with the SageMaker PCA algorithm can help remove noise and redundancy from the data, and improve the model’s performance. PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that transforms the original features into a smaller set of linearly uncorrelated features called principal components. The SageMaker linear learner algorithm supports PCA as a built-in feature transformation option.
Option E is correct because using the SageMaker k-NN algorithm with a dimension reduction target of less than 1,000 can help the model learn from the similarity of the data points, and improve the model’s performance. k-NN is a nonparametric algorithm that classifies an input based on the majority vote of its k nearest neighbors in the feature space. The SageMaker k-NN algorithm supports dimension reduction as a built-in feature transformation option.
Option B is incorrect because using the scikit-learn MDS algorithm to reduce the number of features is not a feasible option, as MDS is a computationally expensive technique that does not scale well to large datasets. MDS is a dimensionality reduction technique that tries to preserve the pairwise distances between the original data points in a lower-dimensional space.
Option C is incorrect because setting the predictor type to regressor would change the model’s objective from classification to regression, which is not suitable for the given problem. A regressor model would output a continuous value instead of a binary label for each phone.
Option D is incorrect because using the SageMaker k-means algorithm with k of less than 1,000 would not help the model classify the phones, as k-means is a clustering algorithm that groups the data points into k clusters based on their similarity, without using any labels. A clustering model would not output a binary label for each phone.

Explanation: To enable the Amazon SageMaker service without enabling direct internet access to Amazon SageMaker notebook instances, the company should create Amazon SageMaker VPC interface endpoints within the corporate VPC. A VPC interface endpoint is a gateway that enables private connections between the VPC and supported AWS services without requiring an internet gateway, a NAT device, a VPN connection, or an AWS Direct Connect connection. The instances in the VPC do not need to connect to the public internet in order to communicate with the Amazon SageMaker service. The VPC interface endpoint connects the VPC directly to the Amazon SageMaker service using AWS PrivateLink, which ensures that the traffic between the VPC and the service does not leave the AWS network1.

Explanation: Principal component analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that attempts to reduce the dimensionality (number of features) within a dataset while still retaining as much information as possible. This is done by finding a new set of features called components, which are composites of the original features that are uncorrelated with one another. They are also constrained so that the first component accounts for the largest possible variability in the data, the second component the second most variability, and so on. By using PCA, the impact of having a large number of features that are highly correlated with each other can be reduced, as the new feature space will have fewer dimensions and less redundancy. This can make the linear models more stable and less prone to overfitting.

Explanation: Amazon Redshift ML enables in-database machine learning model creation and predictions, allowing data scientists to leverage Redshift for model training without needing to export data.
To create and run a model for customer churn prediction in Amazon Redshift ML:

• Define the feature variables and target variable: Identify the columns to use as features (predictors) and the target variable (outcome) for the churn prediction model.
• Create the model: Write a CREATE MODEL SQL statement, which trains the model using Amazon Redshift’s integration with Amazon SageMaker and stores the model directly in Redshift.
• Run predictions: Use the SQL PREDICT function to generate predictions on new data directly within Redshift.

Explanation: Transfer learning is a technique that allows us to use a model trained for a certain task as a starting point for a machine learning model for a different task. For image classification, a common practice is to use a pre-trained model that was trained on a large and general dataset, such as ImageNet, and then customize it for the specific task. One way to customize the model is to replace the last fully connected layer, which is responsible for the final classification, with a new layer that has the same number of units as the number of classes in the new task. This way, the model can leverage the features learned by the previous layers, which are generic and useful for many image recognition tasks, and learn to map them to the new classes. The new layer can be initialized with random weights, and the rest of the model can be initialized with the pre-trained weights. This method is also known as feature extraction, as it extracts meaningful features from the pretrained model and uses them for the new task.

Explanation: The best solution to meet the requirements of the company is to use AWS DataSync to make an initial copy of the entire dataset, and schedule subsequent incremental transfers of changing data until the final cutover from on premises to AWS.

Explanation: Data normalization is a data preprocessing technique that scales the features to a common range, such as [0, 1] or [-1, 1]. This helps reduce the impact of features with high magnitude on the cost function and improves the convergence during backpropagation. Data normalization can be done using different methods, such as minmax scaling, z-score standardization, or unit vector normalization. Data normalization is different from dimensionality reduction, which reduces the number of features; model regularization, which adds a penalty term to the cost function to prevent overfitting; and data augmentation, which increases the amount of data by creating synthetic samples.