Changed MLS-C01 Exam Questions

A private subnet is a subnet that does not have a route to the internet gateway, which means that the resources in the private subnet cannot access the internet or be accessed from the internet. An S3 VPC endpoint is a gateway endpoint that allows the resources in the VPC to access the S3 service without going through the internet. By launching the notebook instances in a private subnet and accessing the data through an S3 VPC endpoint, the company can set up the job in a secure and compliant way, as the data never leaves the AWS network and is not exposed to the internet. This can also improve the performance and reliability of the data transfer, as the traffic does not depend on the internet bandwidth or availability.

References:

• Amazon VPC Endpoints - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
• Endpoints for Amazon S3 - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
• Connect to SageMaker Within your VPC - Amazon SageMaker
• Working with VPCs and Subnets - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

The best solution to improve the accuracy of the model and receive notifications for any future performance issues is to perform incremental training to update the model and activate Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to detect model performance issues and to send notifications. Incremental training is a technique that allows you to update an existing model with new data without retraining the entire model from scratch. This can save time and resources, and help the model adapt to changing data patterns. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor is a feature that continuously monitors the quality of machine learning models in production and notifies you when there are deviations in the model quality, such as data drift and anomalies. You can set up alerts that trigger actions, such as sending notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics, when certain conditions are met.

Option B is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Model Governance is a set of tools that help you implement ML responsibly by simplifying access control and enhancing transparency. It does not provide a mechanism to automatically adjust model hyperparameters or improve model accuracy.

Option C is incorrect because Amazon SageMaker Debugger is a feature that helps you debug and optimize your model training process by capturing relevant data and providing real-time analysis. However, using Debugger alone does not update the model or monitor its performance in production. Also, retraining the model by using only data from the previous several months may not capture the full range of data variability and may introduce bias or overfitting.

Option D is incorrect because using only data from the previous several months to perform incremental training may not be sufficient to improve the model accuracy, as explained above. Moreover, this option does not specify how to activate Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor or configure the alerts and notifications.

References:

• Incremental training
• Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor
• Amazon SageMaker Model Governance
• Amazon SageMaker Debugger

 The solution A will meet the requirements with the most operational efficiency because it uses Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which is a service that simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering for machine learning. The solution A involves the following steps:

• Use Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler preconfigured transformations to explore feature transformations. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides a visual interface that allows data scientists to apply various transformations to their tabular data, such as encoding categorical features, scaling numerical features, imputing missing values, and more. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler also supports custom transformations using Python code or SQL queries1.
• Use SageMaker Data Wrangler templates for visualization. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler also provides a set of templates that can generate visualizations of the data, such as histograms, scatter plots, box plots, and more. These visualizations can help data scientists to understand the distribution and characteristics of the data, and to compare the effects of different feature transformations1.
• Export the feature processing workflow to a SageMaker pipeline for automation. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler can export the feature processing workflow as a SageMaker pipeline, which is a service that orchestrates and automates machine learning workflows. A SageMaker pipeline can run the feature processing steps as a preprocessing step, and then feed the output to a training step or an inference step. This can reduce the operational overhead of managing the feature processing workflow and ensure its consistency and reproducibility2.

The other options are not suitable because:

• Option B: Using an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance to experiment with different feature transformations, saving the transformations to Amazon S3, using Amazon QuickSight for visualization, and packaging the feature processing steps into an AWS Lambda function for automation will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to write the code for the feature transformations, the data storage, the data visualization, and the Lambda function. Moreover, AWS Lambda has limitations on the execution time, memory size, and package size, which may not be sufficient for complex feature processing tasks3.
• Option C: Using AWS Glue Studio with custom code to experiment with different feature transformations, saving the transformations to Amazon S3, using Amazon QuickSight for visualization, and packaging the feature processing steps into an AWS Lambda function for automation will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. AWS Glue Studio is a visual interface that allows data engineers to create and run extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs on AWS Glue. However, AWS Glue Studio does not provide preconfigured transformations or templates for feature engineering or data visualization. The data scientist will have to write custom code for these tasks, as well as for the Lambda function. Moreover, AWS Glue Studio is not integrated with SageMaker pipelines, and it may not be optimized for machine learning workflows4.
• Option D: Using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler preconfigured transformations to experiment with different feature transformations, saving the transformations to Amazon S3, using Amazon QuickSight for visualization, packaging each feature transformation step into a separate AWS Lambda function, and using AWS Step Functions for workflow automation will incur more operational overhead than using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. The data scientist will have to create and manage multiple AWS Lambda functions and AWS Step Functions, which can increase the complexity and cost of the solution. Moreover, AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions may not be compatible with SageMaker pipelines, and they may not be optimized for machine learning workflows5.

References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler
• 2: Amazon SageMaker Pipelines
• 3: AWS Lambda
• 4: AWS Glue Studio
• 5: AWS Step Functions

The most effective way to encode this categorical feature into a numeric feature is to use Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler similarity encoding on the column to create embeddings of vectors of real numbers. Similarity encoding is a technique that transforms categorical features into numerical features by computing the similarity between the categories. Similarity encoding can handle high cardinality and redundancy in categorical features, as it can group similar categories together based on their string similarity. For example, if the column contains the values “aspirin”, “asprin”, and “ibuprofen”, similarity encoding will assign a high similarity score to “aspirin” and “asprin”, and a low similarity score to “ibuprofen”. Similarity encoding can also create embeddings of vectors of real numbers, which can be used as input for machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables you to prepare data for machine learning quickly and easily. You can use SageMaker Data Wrangler to apply similarity encoding to a column of categorical data, and generate embeddings of vectors of real numbers that capture the similarity between the categories1. The other options are either less effective or more complex to implement. Spell checking the column and using one-hot encoding would require additional steps and resources, and may not capture all the misspellings or redundancies. One-hot encoding would also create a large number of features, which could increase the dimensionality and sparsity of the data. Ordinal encoding would assign an arbitrary order to the categories, which could introduce bias or noise in the data. References:

• 1: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – Amazon Web Services