Professional-Machine-Learning-Engineer Sample Questions Answers

The simplest way to deploy a logistic regression model with BigQuery ML to production while adding minimal latency is to export the model in TensorFlow format, and add a tfx_bsl.public.beam.RunInference step to the Dataflow pipeline. This option has the following advantages:

It allows the model prediction to be performed in real time, as part of the Dataflow streaming pipeline that processes the ticket purchase requests. This ensures that the promo code offer is based on the most recent data and customer behavior, and that the offer is delivered to the customer without delay.

It leverages the compatibility and performance of TensorFlow and Dataflow, which are both part of the Google Cloud ecosystem. TensorFlow is a popular and powerful framework for building and deploying machine learning models, and Dataflow is a fully managed service that runs Apache Beam pipelines for data processing and transformation. By using the tfx_bsl.public.beam.RunInference step, you can easily integrate your TensorFlow model with your Dataflow pipeline, and take advantage of the parallelism and scalability of Dataflow.

It simplifies the model deployment and management, as the model is packaged with the Dataflow pipeline and does not require a separate service or endpoint. The model can be updated by redeploying the Dataflow pipeline with a new model version.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Running batch inference with BigQuery ML every five minutes on each new set of tickets issued introduces additional latency and complexity. This option requires running a separate BigQuery job every five minutes, which can incur network overhead and latency. Moreover, this option requires storing and retrieving the intermediate results of the batch inference, which can consume storage space and increase the data transfer time.

Option C: Exporting the model in TensorFlow format, deploying it on Vertex AI, and querying the prediction endpoint from the streaming pipeline introduces additional latency and cost. This option requires creating and managing a Vertex AI endpoint, which is a managed service that provides various tools and features for machine learning, such as training, tuning, serving, and monitoring. However, querying the Vertex AI endpoint from the streaming pipeline requires making an HTTP request, which can incur network overhead and latency. Moreover, this option requires paying for the Vertex AI endpoint usage, which can increase the cost of the model deployment.

Option D: Converting the model with TensorFlow Lite (TFLite), and adding it to the mobile app so that the promo code and the incoming request arrive together in Pub/Sub introduces additional challenges and risks. This option requires converting the model to a TFLite format, which is a lightweight and optimized format for running TensorFlow models on mobile and embedded devices. However, converting the model to TFLite may not preserve the accuracy or functionality of the original model, as some operations or features may not be supported by TFLite. Moreover, this option requires updating the mobile app with the TFLite model, which can be tedious and time-consuming, and may depend on the user’s willingness to update the app. Additionally, this option may expose the model to potential security or privacy issues, as the model is running on the user’s device and may be accessed or modified by malicious actors.

References:

[Exporting models for prediction | BigQuery ML]

[tfx_bsl.public.beam.run_inference | TensorFlow Extended]

[Vertex AI documentation]

[TensorFlow Lite documentation]

The best option for developing a solution that predicts the presence and severity of the disease with high accuracy is to develop an image segmentation ML model to locate the boundaries of the rust spots. Image segmentation is a technique that partitions an image into multiple regions, each corresponding to a different object or semantic category. Image segmentation can be used to detect and localize the rust spots in the images of crops, and measure their shape and size. This information can then be used to determine the presence and severity of the disease, as the rust spots are correlated to the disease symptoms. Image segmentation can also handle the variability of the rust spots, as it does not rely on predefined templates or thresholds. Image segmentation can be implemented using deep learning models, such as U-Net, Mask R-CNN, or DeepLab, which can learn from large-scale datasets and achieve high accuracy and robustness. The other options are not as suitable for developing a solution that predicts the presence and severity of the disease with high accuracy, because:

Creating an object detection model that can localize the rust spots would only provide the bounding boxes of the rust spots, not their exact boundaries. This would result in less precise measurements of the shape and size of the rust spots, and might affect the accuracy of the disease prediction. Object detection models are also more complex and computationally expensive than image segmentation models, as they have to perform both classification and localization tasks.

Developing a template matching algorithm using traditional computer vision libraries would require manually designing and selecting the templates for the rust spots, which might not capture the diversity and variability of the rust spots. Template matching algorithms are also sensitive to noise, occlusion, rotation, and scale changes, and might fail to detect the rust spots in different scenarios. Template matching algorithms are also less accurate and robust than deep learning models, as they do not learn from data.

Developing an image classification ML model to predict the presence of the disease would only provide a binary or categorical output, not the location or severity of the disease. Image classification models are also less informative and interpretable than image segmentation models, as they do not provide any spatial information or visual explanation for the prediction. Image classification models might also suffer from class imbalance or mislabeling issues, as the presence of the disease might not be consistent or clear across the images. References:

Image Segmentation | Computer Vision | Google Developers

Crop diseases and pests detection based on deep learning: a review | Plant Methods | Full Text

Using Deep Learning for Image-Based Plant Disease Detection

Computer Vision, IoT and Data Fusion for Crop Disease Detection Using …

On Using Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things for Crop …

Crop Disease Detection Using Machine Learning and Computer Vision

 Prediction drift is the change in the distribution of feature values or labels over time. It can affect the performance and accuracy of the model, and may require retraining or redeploying the model. Vertex AI Model Monitoring allows you to monitor prediction drift on your deployed models and endpoints, and set up alerts and notifications when the drift exceeds a certain threshold. You can specify an email address to receive the notifications, and use the information to retrigger the training pipeline and deploy an updated version of your model. This is the most direct and convenient way to achieve your goal. References:

Vertex AI Model Monitoring

Monitoring prediction drift

Setting up alerts and notifications

Model retraining is the process of updating an existing machine learning model with new data and parameters to improve its performance and accuracy. Model retraining is essential for maintaining the relevance and validity of the model, especially when the data or the environment changes over time. Model retraining can help to avoid or reduce the effects of model degradation, which is the phenomenon of the model’s predictive performance decreasing as it is tested on new datasets within rapidly evolving environments1.

For the use case of predicting sales numbers, model accuracy is crucial, because the production model is required to keep up with market changes. Market changes can affect the demand, supply, price, and preference of the products, and thus influence the sales numbers. If the model is not retrained with new data that reflects the market changes, it may become outdated and inaccurate, and fail to capture the patterns and trends of the sales numbers. Therefore, the most likely issue that is causing the steady decline in model accuracy is the lack of model retraining.

The other options are not as likely as option B, because they are not directly related to the model’s ability to adapt to market changes. Option A, poor data quality, may affect the model’s accuracy, but it is not a specific cause of model degradation over time. Option C, too few layers in the model for capturing information, may affect the model’s complexity and expressiveness, but it is not a specific cause of model degradation over time. Option D, incorrect data split ratio during model training, evaluation, validation, and test, may affect the model’s generalization and validation, but it is not a specific cause of model degradation over time. Therefore, option B, lack of model retraining, is the best answer for this question.

References:

Beware Steep Decline: Understanding Model Degradation In Machine Learning Models

The best option for creating a Dataflow pipeline for real-time anomaly detection is to load the model directly into the Dataflow job as a dependency, and use it for prediction. This option has the following advantages:

It minimizes the serving latency, as the model prediction logic is executed within the same Dataflow pipeline that ingests and processes the data. There is no need to invoke external services or containers, which can introduce network overhead and latency.

It simplifies the deployment and management of the model, as the model is packaged with the Dataflow job and does not require a separate service or container. The model can be updated by redeploying the Dataflow job with a new model version.

It leverages the scalability and reliability of Dataflow, as the model prediction logic can scale up or down with the data volume and handle failures and retries automatically.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Containerizing the model prediction logic in Cloud Run, which is invoked by Dataflow, introduces additional latency and complexity. Cloud Run is a serverless platform that runs stateless containers, which means that the model prediction logic needs to be initialized and loaded every time a request is made. This can increase the cold start latency and reduce the throughput. Moreover, Cloud Run has a limit on the number of concurrent requests per container, which can affect the scalability of the model prediction logic. Additionally, this option requires managing two separate services: the Dataflow pipeline and the Cloud Run container.

Option C: Deploying the model to a Vertex AI endpoint, and invoking this endpoint in the Dataflow job, also introduces additional latency and complexity. Vertex AI is a managed service that provides various tools and features for machine learning, such as training, tuning, serving, and monitoring. However, invoking a Vertex AI endpoint from a Dataflow job requires making an HTTP request, which can incur network overhead and latency. Moreover, this option requires managing two separate services: the Dataflow pipeline and the Vertex AI endpoint.

Option D: Deploying the model in a TFServing container on Google Kubernetes Engine, and invoking it in the Dataflow job, also introduces additional latency and complexity. TFServing is a high-performance serving system for TensorFlow models, which can handle multiple versions and variants of a model. However, invoking a TFServing container from a Dataflow job requires making a gRPC or REST request, which can incur network overhead and latency. Moreover, this option requires managing two separate services: the Dataflow pipeline and the Google Kubernetes Engine cluster.

References:

[Dataflow documentation]

[TensorFlow documentation]

[Cloud Run documentation]

[Vertex AI documentation]

[TFServing documentation]

Quantization is a technique that reduces the numerical precision of the weights and activations of a neural network, which can improve the inference speed and reduce the memory footprint of the model1.

Reducing the floating point precision from tf.float64 to tf.float16 can potentially halve the latency and memory usage of the model, while having minimal impact on the accuracy2.

Increasing the dropout rate to 0.8 in either mode would not affect the latency, but would likely degrade the performance of the model significantly, as dropout is a regularization technique that randomly drops out units during training to prevent overfitting3.

Switching from CPU to GPU serving may or may not improve the latency, depending on the hardware specifications and the model complexity, but it would also incur additional costs and complexity for deployment4

The easiest way to integrate custom Python code into the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK is to use the func_to_container_op function, which converts a Python function into a pipeline component. This function automatically builds a Docker image that executes the Python function, and returns a factory function that can be used to create kfp.dsl.ContainerOp instances for the pipeline. This option has the following benefits:

It allows the data science team to reuse their existing Python code without rewriting it or packaging it into containers manually.

It simplifies the component specification and implementation, as the function signature defines the component interface and the function body defines the component logic.

It supports various types of inputs and outputs, such as primitive types, files, directories, and dictionaries.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option B: Using the predefined components available in the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to access Dataproc, and run the custom code there, introduces additional complexity and cost. This option requires creating and managing Dataproc clusters, which are ephemeral and scalable clusters of Compute Engine instances that run Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop. Moreover, this option requires writing the custom code in PySpark or Hadoop MapReduce, which may not be compatible with the existing Python code.

Option C: Packaging the custom Python code into Docker containers, and using the load_component_from_file function to import the containers into the pipeline, introduces additional steps and overhead. This option requires creating and maintaining Dockerfiles, building and pushing Docker images, and writing component specifications in YAML files. Moreover, this option requires managing the dependencies and versions of the Python code and the Docker images.

Option D: Deploying the custom Python code to Cloud Functions, and using Kubeflow Pipelines to trigger the Cloud Function, introduces additional latency and limitations. This option requires creating and deploying Cloud Functions, which are serverless functions that execute in response to events. Moreover, this option requires invoking the Cloud Functions from the Kubeflow Pipelines using HTTP requests, which can incur network overhead and latency. Additionally, this option is subject to the quotas and limits of Cloud Functions, such as the maximum execution time and memory usage.

References:

Building Python function-based components | Kubeflow

Building Python Function-based Components | Kubeflow

 Kubeflow is an open source platform for developing, orchestrating, deploying, and running scalable and portable machine learning workflows on Kubernetes. Kubeflow Pipelines is a component of Kubeflow that allows you to build and manage end-to-end machine learning pipelines using a graphical user interface or a Python-based domain-specific language (DSL). Kubeflow Pipelines can help you automate and orchestrate your machine learning workflows, and integrate with various Google Cloud services and tools1

One of the Google Cloud services that you can use with Kubeflow Pipelines is BigQuery, which is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse that allows you to run fast and complex queries on large-scale data. BigQuery can help you analyze and prepare your data for machine learning, and store and manage your machine learning models2

To execute a query against BigQuery as the first step in your Kubeflow pipeline, and use the results of that query as the input to the next step in your pipeline, the easiest way to do that is to use the BigQuery Query Component, which is a pre-built component that you can find in the Kubeflow Pipelines repository on GitHub. The BigQuery Query Component allows you to run a SQL query on BigQuery, and output the results as a table or a file. You can use the component’s URL to load the component into your pipeline, and specify the query and the output parameters. You can then use the output of the component as the input to the next step in your pipeline, such as a data processing or a model training step3

The other options are not as easy or feasible. Using the BigQuery console to execute your query and then save the query results into a new BigQuery table is not a good idea, as it does not integrate with your Kubeflow pipeline, and requires manual intervention and duplication of data. Writing a Python script that uses the BigQuery API to execute queries against BigQuery is not ideal, as it requires writing custom code and handling authentication and error handling. Using the Kubeflow Pipelines DSL to create a custom component that uses the Python BigQuery client library to execute queries is not optimal, as it requires creating and packaging a Docker container image for the component, and testing and debugging the component.

References: 1: Kubeflow Pipelines overview 2: BigQuery overview 3: BigQuery Query Component

TFRecord is a binary file format that stores your data as a sequence of binary strings1. TFRecord files are efficient, scalable, and easy to process1. Sharding is a technique that splits a large file into smaller files, which can improve parallelism and performance2. Dataflow is a service that allows you to create and run data processing pipelines on Google Cloud3. Dataflow can create sharded TFRecord files from your images in a Cloud Storage directory4.

tf.data.TFRecordDataset is a class that allows you to read and parse TFRecord files in TensorFlow. You can use this class to create a tf.data.Dataset object that represents your input data for training. tf.data.Dataset is a high-level API that provides various methods to transform, batch, shuffle, and prefetch your data.

Vertex AI Training is a service that allows you to train your custom models on Google Cloud using various hardware accelerators, such as GPUs. Vertex AI Training supports TensorFlow models and can read data from Cloud Storage. You can use Vertex AI Training to train your image classification model by using a V100 GPU, which is a powerful and fast GPU for deep learning.

References:

TFRecord and tf.Example | TensorFlow Core

Sharding | TensorFlow Core

Dataflow | Google Cloud

Creating sharded TFRecord files | Google Cloud

[tf.data.TFRecordDataset | TensorFlow Core v2.6.0]

[tf.data: Build TensorFlow input pipelines | TensorFlow Core]

[Vertex AI Training | Google Cloud]

[NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU | NVIDIA]

This answer is correct because it uses a regression model to estimate the number of passengers at each shuttle station, which is a continuous variable. A tree-based regression model can handle both numerical and categorical features, such as the time of day, the location of the station, and the weather conditions. Based on the predicted number of passengers, the organization can dispatch a shuttle that has enough capacity and provide a map that shows the required stops. This way, the organization can optimize the shuttle service route and reduce the waiting time and fuel consumption. References:

[Tree-based regression models]

Data leakage is a problem where information from outside the training dataset is used to create the model, resulting in an overly optimistic or invalid estimate of the model performance. Data leakage can occur in time series data when the temporal order of the data is not preserved during data preparation or model evaluation. For example, if the data is shuffled before splitting into train and test sets, or if future data is used to impute missing values in past data, then data leakage can occur.

One way to address data leakage in time series data is to apply nested cross-validation during model training. Nested cross-validation is a technique that allows you to perform both model selection and model evaluation in a robust way, while preserving the temporal order of the data. Nested cross-validation involves two levels of cross-validation: an inner loop for model selection and an outer loop for model evaluation. The inner loop splits the training data into k folds, trains and tunes the model on k-1 folds, and validates the model on the remaining fold. The inner loop repeats this process for each fold and selects the best model based on the validation performance. The outer loop splits the data into n folds, trains the best model from the inner loop on n-1 folds, and tests the model on the remaining fold. The outer loop repeats this process for each fold and evaluates the model performance based on the test results.

Nested cross-validation can help to avoid data leakage in time series data by ensuring that the model is trained and tested on non-overlapping data, and that the data used for validation is never seen by the model during training. Nested cross-validation can also provide a more reliable estimate of the model performance than a single train-test split or a simple cross-validation, as it reduces the variance and bias of the estimate.

References:

Data Leakage in Machine Learning

How to Avoid Data Leakage When Performing Data Preparation

Classification on a single time series - prevent leakage between train and test

Dataproc provides a managed Spark environment and integrates with Jupyter notebooks, ideal for large datasets and rapid prototyping. It reduces setup time compared to manual Spark configurations on Compute Engine or Vertex AI. Colab Enterprise is more suitable for small-scale prototyping rather than extensive Spark-based analysis.

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 BigQuery ML allows you to build and run machine learning models using SQL queries directly within BigQuery, which is one of the simplest approaches because it doesn't require setting up an external environment like Vertex AI or managing infrastructure.

 AutoML regression is more appropriate for predicting customer lifetime value (CLV) compared to ARIMA, which is typically used for time series forecasting (e.g., sales over time, stock prices, etc.). CLV prediction involves understanding complex relationships between customer behavior and value, which is best captured by a regression model.

 Using BigQuery Studio and running a CREATE MODEL statement to build an AutoML regression model offers the simplicity you're looking for because it automates much of the feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning.

 The other options involving ARIMA models (A and B) are not appropriate for CLV, and setting up a Vertex AI Workbench notebook (D) introduces unnecessary complexity for this task.

You are implementing a batch inference ML pipeline in Google Cloud. The model was developed by using TensorFlow and is stored in SavedModel format in Cloud Storage. You need to apply the model to a historical dataset that is stored in a BigQuery table. You want to perform inference with minimal effort. What should you do?

A. Import the TensorFlow model by using the create model statement in BigQuery ML. Apply the historical data to the TensorFlow model.

B. Export the historical data to Cloud Storage in Avro format. Configure a Vertex Al batch prediction job to generate predictions for the exported data.

C. Export the historical data to Cloud Storage in CSV format. Configure a Vertex Al batch prediction job to generate predictions for the exported data.

D. Configure and deploy a Vertex Al endpoint. Use the endpoint to get predictions from the historical data in BigQuery.

Answer: B

 Vertex AI batch prediction is the most appropriate and efficient way to apply a pre-trained model like TensorFlow’s SavedModel to a large dataset, especially for batch processing.

 The Vertex AI batch prediction job works by exporting your dataset (in this case, historical data from BigQuery) to a suitable format (like Avro or CSV) and then processing it in Cloud Storage where the model is stored.

 Avro format is recommended for large datasets as it is highly efficient for data storage and is optimized for read/write operations in Google Cloud, which is why option B is correct.

 Option A suggests using BigQuery ML for inference, but it does not support running arbitrary TensorFlow models directly within BigQuery ML. Hence, BigQuery ML is not a valid option for this particular task.

 Option C (exporting to CSV) is a valid alternative but is less efficient compared to Avro in terms of performance.

 Option D suggests deploying a Vertex AI endpoint, which is better suited for real-time inference rather than batch inference. Since the question asks for batch inference, B is the best answer.

Vertex AI Endpoint is a service that allows you to serve your ML models online and scale them automatically. You can use Vertex AI Endpoint to deploy the custom ML model that you developed for recommending recipes to the users. You can maintain the same machine type on the endpoint, which is a single machine with 8 vCPUs and no accelerators. This machine type can optimize the costs by using the queries per second (QPS) that the model can serve. You can also configure the endpoint to enable autoscaling based on vCPU usage. Autoscaling is a feature that allows the endpoint to adjust the number of compute nodes based on the traffic demand. By enabling autoscaling based on vCPU usage, you can ensure that the endpoint can scale efficiently to the increased demand during the holiday season, without overprovisioning or underprovisioning the resources. You can also set up a monitoring job and an alert for CPU usage. Monitoring is a service that allows you to collect and analyze the metrics and logs from your Google Cloud resources. You can use Monitoring to monitor the CPU usage of your endpoint, which is an indicator of the load and performance of your model. You can also set up an alert for CPU usage, which is a feature that allows you to receive notifications when the CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold. By setting up a monitoring job and an alert for CPU usage, you can keep track of the health and status of your endpoint, and detect any issues or anomalies. If you receive an alert, you can investigate the cause by using the Monitoring dashboard, which provides a graphical interface for viewing and analyzing the metrics and logs from your endpoint. You can also use the Monitoring dashboard to troubleshoot and resolve the issues, such as adjusting the autoscaling parameters, optimizing the model, or updating the machine type. By using Vertex AI Endpoint, autoscaling, and Monitoring, you can ensure that the model can scale efficiently to the increased demand during the holiday season, and handle any issues or alerts that might arise. References:

[Vertex AI Endpoint documentation]

[Autoscaling documentation]

[Monitoring documentation]

[Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate]

According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “design, build, and productionalize ML models to solve business challenges using Google Cloud technologies”. TPUs2 are Google’s custom-developed application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) used to accelerate machine learning workloads. TPUs are designed to handle large batch sizes, high dimensional data, and complex computations. TPUs can significantly reduce the training time and compute costs of large language models, especially when used with distributed training strategies, such as MultiWorkerMirroredStrategy3. Therefore, option D is the best way to configure a training architecture that minimizes both training time and compute costs for the given use case. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

TPUs

MultiWorkerMirroredStrategy

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “design, build, and productionalize ML models to solve business challenges using Google Cloud technologies”. AutoML Vision2 is a service that allows you to train and deploy custom vision models for image classification and object detection. AutoML Vision simplifies the model development process by providing a graphical user interface and a no-code approach. You can use AutoML Vision to train an object detection model by using the annotated image data, and evaluate the model performance using metrics such as mean average precision (mAP) and intersection over union (IoU)3. Therefore, option B is the best way to quickly create an initial model for the given use case. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

AutoML Vision

Object detection evaluation

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

AI Platform Training is a service that allows you to run your machine learning experiments on Google Cloud using various features, model architectures, and hyperparameters. You can use AI Platform Training to scale up your experiments, leverage distributed training, and access specialized hardware such as GPUs and TPUs1. Cloud Monitoring is a service that collects and analyzes metrics, logs, and traces from Google Cloud, AWS, and other sources. You can use Cloud Monitoring to create dashboards, alerts, and reports based on your data2. The Monitoring API is an interface that allows you to programmatically access and manipulate your monitoring data3.

By using AI Platform Training and Cloud Monitoring, you can track and report your experiments while minimizing manual effort. You can write the accuracy metrics from your experiments to Cloud Monitoring using the AI Platform Training Python package4. You can then query the results using the Monitoring API and compare the performance of different experiments. You can also visualize the metrics in the Cloud Console or create custom dashboards and alerts5. Therefore, using AI Platform Training and Cloud Monitoring is the best option for this use case.

References:

AI Platform Training documentation

Cloud Monitoring documentation

Monitoring API overview

Using Cloud Monitoring with AI Platform Training

Viewing evaluation metrics

This option is the best way to architect the workflow, as it allows you to use event-driven and serverless components to automate the ML training process. Cloud Storage triggers are a feature that allows you to send notifications to a Pub/Sub topic when an object is created, deleted, or updated in a storage bucket. Pub/Sub is a service that allows you to publish and subscribe to messages on various topics. Pub/Sub-triggered Cloud Functions are a type of Cloud Functions that are invoked when a message is published to a specific Pub/Sub topic. Cloud Functions are a serverless platform that allows you to run code in response to events. By using these components, you can create a workflow that starts the training job on a GKE cluster as soon as a new file is available in the Cloud Storage bucket, without having to manage any servers or poll for changes. The other options are not as efficient or scalable as this option. Dataflow is a service that allows you to create and run data processing pipelines, but it is not designed to trigger ML training jobs on GKE. App Engine is a service that allows you to build and deploy web applications, but it is not suitable for polling Cloud Storage for new files, as it may incur unnecessary costs and latency. Cloud Scheduler is a service that allows you to schedule jobs at regular intervals, but it is not ideal for triggering ML training jobs based on data availability, as it may miss some files or run unnecessary jobs. References:

Cloud Storage triggers documentation

Pub/Sub documentation

Pub/Sub-triggered Cloud Functions documentation

Cloud Functions documentation

Kubeflow Pipelines documentation

 Transfer learning is a technique that leverages the knowledge and weights of a pre-trained model and adapts them to a new task or domain1. Transfer learning can save time and resources by avoiding training a model from scratch, and can also improve the performance and generalization of the model by using a larger and more diverse dataset2. AI Platform provides several established text classification models that can be used for transfer learning, such as BERT, ALBERT, or XLNet3. These models are based on state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques and can handle various text classification tasks, such as sentiment analysis, topic classification, or spam detection4. By using one of these models on AI Platform, you can customize the model’s code, serving, and deployment, and use Kubeflow pipelines for the ML platform. Therefore, using an established text classification model on AI Platform to perform transfer learning is the best option for this use case.

References:

Transfer Learning - Machine Learning’s Next Frontier

A Comprehensive Hands-on Guide to Transfer Learning with Real-World Applications in Deep Learning

Text classification models

Text Classification with Pre-trained Models in TensorFlow

The best option for resolving the training-serving skew alert is to update the model monitoring job to use the more recent training data that was used to retrain the model. This option can help align the baseline distribution of the model monitoring job with the current distribution of the production data, and eliminate the false positive alerts. Model Monitoring is a service that can track and compare the results of multiple machine learning runs. Model Monitoring can monitor the model’s prediction input data for feature skew and drift. Training-serving skew occurs when the feature data distribution in production deviates from the feature data distribution used to train the model. If the original training data is available, you can enable skew detection to monitor your models for training-serving skew. Model Monitoring uses TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV) to calculate the distributions and distance scores for each feature, and compares them with a baseline distribution. The baseline distribution is the statistical distribution of the feature’s values in the training data. If the distance score for a feature exceeds an alerting threshold that you set, Model Monitoring sends you an email alert. However, if you retrain the model with more recent training data, and deploy it back to the Vertex AI endpoint, the baseline distribution of the model monitoring job may become outdated and inconsistent with the current distribution of the production data. This can cause the model monitoring job to generate false positive alerts, even if the model performance is not deteriorated. To avoid this problem, you need to update the model monitoring job to use the more recent training data that was used to retrain the model. This can help the model monitoring job to recalculate the baseline distribution and the distance scores, and compare them with the current distribution of the production data. This can also help the model monitoring job to detect any true positive alerts, such as a sudden change in the production data that causes the model performance to degrade1.

The other options are not as good as option B, for the following reasons:

Option A: Updating the model monitoring job to use a lower sampling rate would not resolve the training-serving skew alert, and could reduce the accuracy and reliability of the model monitoring job. The sampling rate is a parameter that determines the percentage of prediction requests that are logged and analyzed by the model monitoring job. Using a lower sampling rate can reduce the storage and computation costs of the model monitoring job, but also the quality and validity of the data. Using a lower sampling rate can introduce sampling bias and noise into the data, and make the model monitoring job miss some important features or patterns of the data. Moreover, using a lower sampling rate would not address the root cause of the training-serving skew alert, which is the mismatch between the baseline distribution and the current distribution of the production data2.

Option C: Temporarily disabling the alert, and enabling the alert again after a sufficient amount of new production traffic has passed through the Vertex AI endpoint, would not resolve the training-serving skew alert, and could expose the model to potential risks and errors. Disabling the alert would stop the model monitoring job from sending email notifications when the distance score for a feature exceeds the alerting threshold, but it would not stop the model monitoring job from calculating and comparing the distributions and distance scores. Therefore, disabling the alert would not address the root cause of the training-serving skew alert, which is the mismatch between the baseline distribution and the current distribution of the production data. Moreover, disabling the alert would prevent the model monitoring job from detecting any true positive alerts, such as a sudden change in the production data that causes the model performance to degrade. This can expose the model to potential risks and errors, and affect the user satisfaction and trust1.

Option D: Temporarily disabling the alert until the model can be retrained again on newer training data, and retraining the model again after a sufficient amount of new production traffic has passed through the Vertex AI endpoint, would not resolve the training-serving skew alert, and could cause unnecessary costs and efforts. Disabling the alert would stop the model monitoring job from sending email notifications when the distance score for a feature exceeds the alerting threshold, but it would not stop the model monitoring job from calculating and comparing the distributions and distance scores. Therefore, disabling the alert would not address the root cause of the training-serving skew alert, which is the mismatch between the baseline distribution and the current distribution of the production data. Moreover, disabling the alert would prevent the model monitoring job from detecting any true positive alerts, such as a sudden change in the production data that causes the model performance to degrade. This can expose the model to potential risks and errors, and affect the user satisfaction and trust. Retraining the model again on newer training data would create a new model version, but it would not update the model monitoring job to use the newer training data as the baseline distribution. Therefore, retraining the model again on newer training data would not resolve the training-serving skew alert, and could cause unnecessary costs and efforts1.

References:

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer, Course 3: Production ML Systems, Week 4: Evaluation

Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer Exam Guide, Section 3: Scaling ML models in production, 3.3 Monitoring ML models in production

Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Engineer Study Guide, Chapter 6: Production ML Systems, Section 6.3: Monitoring ML Models

Using Model Monitoring

Understanding the score threshold slider

Sampling rate

AutoML Translation is a service that allows you to create and train custom ML models for translating text between different languages. You can use AutoML Translation to train a model that can translate instruction manuals for scientific products to 15 different languages. You can also use Translation Hub to configure a project and use the trained model to translate the documents. Translation Hub is a service that allows you to manage and automate your translation workflows on Google Cloud. You can use Translation Hub to upload the documents to a Cloud Storage bucket, select the source and target languages, and apply the trained model to translate the documents. You can also use Translation Hub to download the translated documents or save them to another Cloud Storage bucket. You can also use human reviewers to evaluate the incorrect translations. Human reviewers are people who can review and correct the translations produced by the ML model. You can use human reviewers to improve the quality and accuracy of the translations, and provide feedback to the ML model. You can use Translation Hub to integrate with third-party human review services, such as Google Translate Community or Appen. By using AutoML Translation, Translation Hub, and human reviewers, you can implement a scalable solution that maximizes accuracy and minimizes operational overhead. You can also include a process to evaluate and fix incorrect translations. References:

[AutoML Translation documentation]

[Translation Hub documentation]

[Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate]

Reasoning: The question asks for a design that serves asynchronous predictions to determine whether a machine part will fail. This means that the predictions do not need to be returned immediately to the sensors, but can be processed in batches and sent to a downstream system for monitoring. Option B is the only one that uses a streaming data pipeline with Pub/Sub and Dataflow, which can handle real-time data ingestion, processing, and prediction. Option B also invokes the model for prediction, which is required by the question. The other options either use synchronous predictions (option A), batch predictions (options C and D), or do not invoke the model for prediction (option D).

References: You can learn more about the differences between synchronous, asynchronous, and batch predictions in Vertex AI from this document. You can also find examples of how to use Pub/Sub and Dataflow for streaming data pipelines from this tutorial and this codelab.

The option C is the most efficient and scalable solution for deploying a machine learning workflow with multiple models while ensuring version control and minimizing compute resource utilization. By exposing each model as an endpoint in Vertex AI Endpoints, it allows for easy versioning and management of individual models. Using Cloud Run to orchestrate the workflow ensures that the application can scale down to zero, thus minimizing resource utilization when not in use. Cloud Run is a service that allows you to run stateless containers on a fully managed environment or on Google Kubernetes Engine. You can use Cloud Run to invoke the endpoints of each model in the workflow and pass the data between them. You can also use Cloud Run to handle the input and output of the workflow and provide an HTTP interface for the application. References:

Vertex AI Endpoints documentation

Cloud Run documentation

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

The best option for building an ML model to predict customer purchase behavior in BigQuery ML is to use the transform clause with the ML.ONE_HOT_ENCODER function on the categorical features at model creation and select the categorical and non-categorical features. This option allows you to encode the categorical features as one-hot vectors, which are binary vectors that have only one non-zero element. One-hot encoding is a common technique for handling categorical features in ML models, as it can reduce the dimensionality and sparsity of the data, and avoid the ordinality problem that arises when using numerical labels for categorical values1. The transform clause is a feature of BigQuery ML that lets you apply SQL expressions to transform the input data at model creation time. The transform clause can perform feature engineering, such as one-hot encoding, on the fly, without requiring you to create and store a new table with the transformed data2. By using the transform clause with the ML.ONE_HOT_ENCODER function, you can create and train an ML model in BigQuery ML with a single SQL statement, and export it to Cloud Storage for online prediction.

The other options are not as good as option A, for the following reasons:

Option B: Using the ML.ONE_HOT_ENCODER function on the categorical features, and selecting the encoded categorical features and non-categorical features as inputs to create your model, would require more steps and storage than using the transform clause. The ML.ONE_HOT_ENCODER function is a BigQuery ML function that returns a one-hot encoded vector for a given categorical value. However, using this function alone would not apply the one-hot encoding to the input data at model creation time. You would need to create a new table with the encoded features, and use that table as the input to create your model. This would incur additional storage costs and reduce the performance of the queries.

Option C: Using the create model statement and selecting the categorical and non-categorical features, would not handle the categorical features properly and could result in a poor model performance. The create model statement is a BigQuery ML statement that creates and trains an ML model from a SQL query. However, if the input data contains categorical features, you need to encode them as one-hot vectors or use the category_count option to specify the number of categories for each feature. Otherwise, BigQuery ML would treat the categorical features as numerical values, which can introduce bias and noise into the model3.

Option D: Using the ML.ONE_HOT_ENCODER function on the categorical features, and selecting the encoded categorical features and non-categorical features as inputs to create your model, is the same as option B, and has the same drawbacks.

References:

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer, Course 2: Data Engineering for ML on Google Cloud, Week 2: Feature Engineering

Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer Exam Guide, Section 1: Architecting low-code ML solutions, 1.1 Developing ML models by using BigQuery ML

Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Engineer Study Guide, Chapter 3: Data Engineering for ML, Section 3.2: BigQuery for ML

One-hot encoding

Using the TRANSFORM clause for feature engineering

Creating a model

ML.ONE_HOT_ENCODER function

 Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique that enables an agent to learn from its own actions and feedback in an environment. Reinforcement learning does not require labeled data or explicit rules, but rather relies on trial and error and reward and punishment mechanisms to optimize the agent’s behavior and achieve a goal. Reinforcement learning can be used to solve complex and dynamic problems that involve sequential decision making and adaptation to changing situations1.

For the use case of creating an inventory prediction model for a large grocery retailer with stores in multiple regions, reinforcement learning is a suitable algorithm to use. This is because the problem involves multiple factors that affect the inventory demand, such as region, location, historical demand, and seasonal popularity, and the inventory manager needs to make optimal decisions on how much and when to order, store, and distribute the products. Reinforcement learning can help the inventory manager to learn from the new inventory data on a daily basis, and adjust the inventory policy accordingly. Reinforcement learning can also handle the uncertainty and variability of the inventory demand, and balance the trade-off between overstocking and understocking2.

The other options are not as suitable as option B, because they are not designed to handle sequential decision making and adaptation to changing situations. Option A, classification, is a machine learning technique that assigns a label to an input based on predefined categories. Classification can be used to predict the inventory demand for a single product or a single period, but it cannot optimize the inventory policy over multiple products and periods. Option C, recurrent neural networks (RNN), are a type of neural network that can process sequential data, such as text, speech, or time series. RNN can be used to model the temporal patterns and dependencies of the inventory demand, but they cannot learn from feedback and rewards. Option D, convolutional neural networks (CNN), are a type of neural network that can process spatial data, such as images, videos, or graphs. CNN can be used to extract features and patterns from the inventory data, but they cannot optimize the inventory policy over multiple actions and states. Therefore, option B, reinforcement learning, is the best answer for this question.

References:

Reinforcement learning - Wikipedia

Reinforcement Learning for Inventory Optimization

Option A is correct because using F-score where recall is weighed more than precision is a suitable metric for binary classification with imbalanced data. F-score is a harmonic mean of precision and recall, which are two metrics that measure the accuracy and completeness of the positive class1. Precision is the fraction of true positives among all predicted positives, while recall is the fraction of true positives among all actual positives1. When the data is imbalanced, the positive class is the minority class, which is usually the class of interest. For example, in this case, the positive class is the images that contain the company’s logo, which are rare but important to detect. By weighing recall more than precision, we can emphasize the importance of finding all the positive examples, even if some false positives are included2.

Option B is incorrect because using RMSE (root mean squared error) is not a valid metric for binary classification with imbalanced data. RMSE is a metric that measures the average magnitude of the errors between the predicted and actual values3. RMSE is suitable for regression problems, where the target variable is continuous, not for classification problems, where the target variable is discrete4.

Option C is incorrect because using F1 score is not the best metric for binary classification with imbalanced data. F1 score is a special case of F-score where precision and recall are equally weighted1. F1 score is suitable for balanced data, where the positive and negative classes are equally important and frequent5. However, for imbalanced data, the positive class is more important and less frequent than the negative class, so F1 score may not reflect the performance of the model well2.

Option D is incorrect because using F-score where precision is weighed more than recall is not a good metric for binary classification with imbalanced data. By weighing precision more than recall, we can emphasize the importance of minimizing the false positives, even if some true positives are missed2. However, for imbalanced data, the true positives are more important and less frequent than the false positives, so this metric may not reflect the performance of the model well2.

References:

Precision, recall, and F-measure

F-score for imbalanced data

RMSE

Regression vs classification

F1 score

[Imbalanced classification]

[Binary classification]

Option A is correct because using BigQuery ML to run several regression models, and analyze their performance is the most efficient and self-serviced way to complete the task. BigQuery ML is a service that allows you to create and use ML models within BigQuery using SQL queries1. You can use BigQuery ML to run different types of regression models, such as linear regression, logistic regression, or DNN regression2. You can also use BigQuery ML to analyze the performance of your models, such as the mean squared error, the accuracy, or the ROC curve3. BigQuery ML is fast, scalable, and easy to use, as it does not require any data movement, coding, or additional tools4.

Option B is incorrect because reading the data from BigQuery using Dataproc, and running several models using SparkML is not the most efficient and self-serviced way to complete the task. Dataproc is a service that allows you to create and manage clusters of virtual machines that run Apache Spark and other open-source tools5. SparkML is a library that provides ML algorithms and utilities for Spark. However, this option requires more effort and resources than option A, as it involves moving the data from BigQuery to Dataproc, creating and configuring the clusters, writing and running the SparkML code, and analyzing the results.

Option C is incorrect because using Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks with scikit-learn code for a variety of ML algorithms and performance metrics is not the most efficient and self-serviced way to complete the task. Vertex AI Workbench is a service that allows you to create and use notebooks for ML development and experimentation. Scikit-learn is a library that provides ML algorithms and utilities for Python. However, this option also requires more effort and resources than option A, as it involves creating and managing the notebooks, writing and running the scikit-learn code, and analyzing the results.

Option D is incorrect because training a custom TensorFlow model with Vertex AI, reading the data from BigQuery featuring a variety of ML algorithms is not the most efficient and self-serviced way to complete the task. TensorFlow is a framework that allows you to create and train ML models using Python or other languages. Vertex AI is a service that allows you to train and deploy ML models using built-in algorithms or custom containers. However, this option also requires more effort and resources than option A, as it involves writing and running the TensorFlow code, creating and managing the training jobs, and analyzing the results.

References:

BigQuery ML overview

Creating a model in BigQuery ML

Evaluating a model in BigQuery ML

BigQuery ML benefits

Dataproc overview

[SparkML overview]

[Vertex AI Workbench overview]

[Scikit-learn overview]

[TensorFlow overview]

[Vertex AI overview]

A random forest is an ensemble learning method that consists of many decision trees. It can be used for both regression and classification tasks. A random forest classification model can predict the probability of churn for each customer by assigning them to different classes, such as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk. A random forest model can also generate feature importances, which measure how much each feature contributes to the prediction. Feature importances can help interpret the model and understand what factors influence customer churn. Vertex AI Workbench is an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows you to create and run Jupyter notebooks on Google Cloud. You can use Vertex AI Workbench to build a random forest classification model in Python, using libraries such as scikit-learn or TensorFlow. You can also configure the model to generate feature importances after the model is trained, and visualize them using plots or tables. This solution can help you build an interpretable model for customer churn prediction, and use the results to design marketing campaigns that target at-risk customers. References:

Random Forests | scikit-learn

Vertex AI Workbench | Google Cloud

Interpreting Random Forests | Towards Data Science

In this scenario, the goal is to create a custom fraud detection model using AutoML Tables. Fraud detection is a type of binary classification problem, where the model needs to predict whether a transaction is fraudulent or not. The optimization objective is a metric that defines how the model is trained and evaluated. AutoML Tables allows you to choose from different optimization objectives for binary classification problems, such as Log loss, Precision at a Recall value, AUC PR, and AUC ROC.

To choose the best optimization objective for fraud detection, we need to consider the characteristics of the problem and the data. Fraud detection is a problem where the positive class (fraudulent transactions) is very rare compared to the negative class (legitimate transactions). This means that the data is highly imbalanced, and the model needs to be sensitive to the minority class. Moreover, fraud detection is a problem where the cost of false negatives (missing a fraudulent transaction) is much higher than the cost of false positives (flagging a legitimate transaction as fraudulent). This means that the model needs to have high recall (the ability to detect all fraudulent transactions) while maintaining high precision (the ability to avoid false alarms).

Given these considerations, the best optimization objective for fraud detection is the one that maximizes the area under the precision-recall curve (AUC PR) value. The AUC PR value is a metric that measures the trade-off between precision and recall for different probability thresholds. A higher AUC PR value means that the model can achieve high precision and high recall at the same time. The AUC PR value is also more suitable for imbalanced data than the AUC ROC value, which measures the trade-off between the true positive rate and the false positive rate. The AUC ROC value can be misleading for imbalanced data, as it can give a high score even if the model has low recall or low precision.

Therefore, option C is the correct answer. Option A is not suitable, as Log loss is a metric that measures the difference between the predicted probabilities and the actual labels, and does not account for the trade-off between precision and recall. Option B is not suitable, as Precision at a Recall value is a metric that measures the precision at a fixed recall level, and does not account for the trade-off between precision and recall at different thresholds. Option D is not suitable, as AUC ROC is a metric that can be misleading for imbalanced data, as explained above.

References:

AutoML Tables documentation

Optimization objectives for binary classification

Precision-Recall Curves: How to Easily Evaluate Machine Learning Models in No Time

ROC Curves and Area Under the Curve Explained (video)

The best option for optimizing the data processing pipeline for run time and compute resources utilization is to embed the augmentation functions dynamically in the tf.Data pipeline. This option has the following advantages:

It allows the data augmentation to be performed on the fly, without creating or storing additional copies of the data. This saves storage space and reduces the data transfer time.

It leverages the parallelism and performance of the tf.Data API, which can efficiently apply the augmentation functions to multiple batches of data in parallel, using multiple CPU cores or GPU devices. The tf.Data API also supports various optimization techniques, such as caching, prefetching, and autotuning, to improve the data processing speed and reduce the latency.

It integrates seamlessly with the TensorFlow and Keras models, which can consume the tf.Data datasets as inputs for training and evaluation. The tf.Data API also supports various data formats, such as images, text, audio, and video, and various data sources, such as files, databases, and web services.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option B: Embedding the augmentation functions dynamically as part of Keras generators introduces some limitations and overhead. Keras generators are Python generators that yield batches of data for training or evaluation. However, Keras generators are not compatible with the tf.distribute API, which is used to distribute the training across multiple devices or machines. Moreover, Keras generators are not as efficient or scalable as the tf.Data API, as they run on a single Python thread and do not support parallelism or optimization techniques.

Option C: Using Dataflow to create all possible augmentations, and store them as TFRecords introduces additional complexity and cost. Dataflow is a fully managed service that runs Apache Beam pipelines for data processing and transformation. However, using Dataflow to create all possible augmentations requires generating and storing a large number of augmented images, which can consume a lot of storage space and incur storage and network costs. Moreover, using Dataflow to create the augmentations requires writing and deploying a separate Dataflow pipeline, which can be tedious and time-consuming.

Option D: Using Dataflow to create the augmentations dynamically per training run, and stage them as TFRecords introduces additional complexity and latency. Dataflow is a fully managed service that runs Apache Beam pipelines for data processing and transformation. However, using Dataflow to create the augmentations dynamically per training run requires running a Dataflow pipeline every time the model is trained, which can introduce latency and delay the training process. Moreover, using Dataflow to create the augmentations requires writing and deploying a separate Dataflow pipeline, which can be tedious and time-consuming.

References:

[tf.data: Build TensorFlow input pipelines]

[Image augmentation | TensorFlow Core]

[Dataflow documentation]

Option A is incorrect because training a time-series model to predict the machines’ performance values, and configuring an alert if a machine’s actual performance values significantly differ from the predicted performance values, is not the best way to build a predictive maintenance solution that uses monitoring data from the VMs to detect potential failures and then alerts the service desk team. This option assumes that the performance values follow a predictable pattern, which may not be the case for complex systems. Moreover, this option does not use any historical incident data, which may contain useful information for identifying failures. Furthermore, this option does not involve any model evaluation or validation, which are essential steps for ensuring the quality and reliability of the model.

Option B is correct because implementing a simple heuristic (e.g., based on z-score) to label the machines’ historical performance data, and training a model to predict anomalies based on this labeled dataset, is a reasonable way to build a predictive maintenance solution that uses monitoring data from the VMs to detect potential failures and then alerts the service desk team. This option uses a simple and fast method to label the historical performance data, which is necessary for supervised learning. A z-score is a measure of how many standard deviations a value is away from the mean of a distribution1. By using a z-score, we can label the performance values that are unusually high or low as anomalies, which may indicate failures. Then, we can train a model to learn the patterns of normal and anomalous performance values, and use it to predict anomalies on new data. We can also evaluate and validate the model using metrics such as precision, recall, or F1-score, and compare it with other models or methods.

Option C is incorrect because developing a simple heuristic (e.g., based on z-score) to label the machines’ historical performance data, and testing this heuristic in a production environment, is not a safe way to build a predictive maintenance solution that uses monitoring data from the VMs to detect potential failures and then alerts the service desk team. This option does not involve any model training or evaluation, which are essential steps for ensuring the quality and reliability of the solution. Moreover, this option does not test the heuristic on a separate dataset, such as a validation or test set, before deploying it to production, which may lead to errors or failures in the production environment.

Option D is incorrect because hiring a team of qualified analysts to review and label the machines’ historical performance data, and training a model based on this manually labeled dataset, is not a feasible way to build a predictive maintenance solution that uses monitoring data from the VMs to detect potential failures and then alerts the service desk team. This option may produce high-quality labels, but it is also costly, time-consuming, and prone to human errors or biases. Moreover, this option may not scale well with large or complex datasets, which may require more analysts or more time to label.

References:

Z-score

[Predictive maintenance]

[Anomaly detection]

[Time-series analysis]

[Model evaluation]

Kubeflow Pipelines allows for efficient use of compute resources through parallel task execution and caching, which eliminates redundant executions1. By enabling caching in all the steps of the Kubeflow pipeline, you can avoid re-running the same steps when you execute the pipeline multiple times. This can significantly speed up the pipeline execution and reduce your development time without incurring additional costs

According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “configure and optimize model monitoring jobs”. Vertex AI Model Monitoring documentation states that “model monitoring helps you detect when your model’s performance degrades over time due to changes in the data that your model receives or returns” and that "you can configure model monitoring to send notifications to Pub/Sub when it detects anomalies or drift in your model’s predictions"2. Therefore, enabling model monitoring on the Vertex AI endpoint and configuring Pub/Sub to call the Cloud Function when feature drift is detected would help you keep the model up-to-date and minimize retraining costs. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Vertex AI Model Monitoring

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

According to the web search results, the TFRecord format is a recommended way to store large amounts of data efficiently and improve the performance of the data input pipeline123. The TFRecord format is a binary format that can be compressed and serialized, which reduces the I/O overhead and the memory footprint of the data1. The tf.data API provides tools to create and read TFRecord files easily1.

The other options are not as effective as option A. Option B would reduce the amount of data available for training and might affect the model accuracy. Option C would still require reading from a single CSV file at a time, which might not utilize the full bandwidth of the remote storage. Option D would only affect the order of the data elements, not the speed of reading them.

 The best option for developing an image classification model by using a large dataset that contains labeled images in a Cloud Storage bucket is to import the labeled images as a managed dataset in Vertex AI and use AutoML to train the model. This option allows you to leverage the power and simplicity of Google Cloud to create and deploy a high-quality image classification model with minimal code and configuration. Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and deploying machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. Vertex AI can create a managed dataset from a Cloud Storage bucket that contains labeled images, which can be used to train an AutoML model. AutoML is a service that can automatically build and optimize machine learning models for various tasks, such as image classification, object detection, natural language processing, and tabular data analysis. AutoML can handle the complex aspects of machine learning, such as feature engineering, model architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation. AutoML can also evaluate, deploy, and monitor the image classification model, and provide online or batch predictions. By using Vertex AI and AutoML, users can develop an image classification model by using a large dataset with ease and efficiency.

The other options are not as good as option C, for the following reasons:

Option A: Using Vertex AI Pipelines with the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to create a pipeline that reads the images from Cloud Storage and trains the model would require more skills and steps than using Vertex AI and AutoML. Vertex AI Pipelines is a service that can orchestrate machine learning workflows using Vertex AI. Vertex AI Pipelines can run preprocessing and training steps on custom Docker images, and evaluate, deploy, and monitor the machine learning model. Kubeflow Pipelines SDK is a Python library that can create and run pipelines on Vertex AI Pipelines or on Kubeflow, an open-source platform for machine learning on Kubernetes. However, using Vertex AI Pipelines and Kubeflow Pipelines SDK would require writing code, building Docker images, defining pipeline components and steps, and managing the pipeline execution and artifacts. Moreover, Vertex AI Pipelines and Kubeflow Pipelines SDK are not specialized for image classification, and users would need to use other libraries or frameworks, such as TensorFlow or PyTorch, to build and train the image classification model.

Option B: Using Vertex AI Pipelines with TensorFlow Extended (TFX) to create a pipeline that reads the images from Cloud Storage and trains the model would require more skills and steps than using Vertex AI and AutoML. TensorFlow Extended (TFX) is a framework that can create and run end-to-end machine learning pipelines on TensorFlow, a popular library for building and training deep learning models. TFX can preprocess the data, train and evaluate the model, validate and push the model, and serve the model for online or batch predictions. However, using Vertex AI Pipelines and TFX would require writing code, building Docker images, defining pipeline components and steps, and managing the pipeline execution and artifacts. Moreover, TFX is not optimized for image classification, and users would need to use other libraries or tools, such as TensorFlow Data Validation, TensorFlow Transform, and TensorFlow Hub, to handle the image data and the model architecture.

Option D: Converting the image dataset to a tabular format using Dataflow, loading the data into BigQuery, and using BigQuery ML to train the model would not handle the image data properly and could result in a poor model performance. Dataflow is a service that can create scalable and reliable pipelines to process large volumes of data from various sources. Dataflow can preprocess the data by using Apache Beam, a programming model for defining and executing data processing workflows. BigQuery is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse that can perform fast and interactive queries on large datasets. BigQuery ML is a service that can create and train machine learning models by using SQL queries on BigQuery. However, converting the image data to a tabular format would lose the spatial and semantic information of the images, which are essential for image classification. Moreover, BigQuery ML is not specialized for image classification, and users would need to use other tools or techniques, such as feature hashing, embedding, or one-hot encoding, to handle the categorical features.

 The best option for determining how often to retrain your model to maintain a high level of performance while minimizing cost is to run training-serving skew detection batch jobs every few days. Training-serving skew refers to the discrepancy between the distributions of the features in the training dataset and the serving data. This can cause the model to perform poorly on the new data, as it is not representative of the data that the model was trained on. By running training-serving skew detection batch jobs, you can monitor the changes in the feature distributions over time, and identify when the skew becomes significant enough to affect the model performance. If skew is detected, you can send the most recent serving data to the labeling service, and use the labeled data to retrain your model. This option has the following benefits:

It allows you to retrain your model only when necessary, based on the actual data changes, rather than on a fixed schedule or a heuristic. This can save you the cost of the labeling service and the retraining process, and also avoid overfitting or underfitting your model.

It leverages the existing tools and frameworks for training-serving skew detection, such as TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV) and Vertex Data Labeling. TFDV is a library that can compute and visualize descriptive statistics for your datasets, and compare the statistics across different datasets. Vertex Data Labeling is a service that can label your data with high quality and low latency, using either human labelers or automated labelers.

It integrates well with the MLOps practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which can automate the workflow of running the skew detection jobs, sending the data to the labeling service, retraining the model, and deploying the new model version.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Training an anomaly detection model on the training dataset, and running all incoming requests through this model, introduces additional complexity and overhead. This option requires building and maintaining a separate model for anomaly detection, which can be challenging and time-consuming. Moreover, this option requires running the anomaly detection model on every request, which can increase the latency and resource consumption of the prediction service. Additionally, this option may not capture the subtle changes in the feature distributions that can affect the model performance, as anomalies are usually defined as rare or extreme events.

Option B: Identifying temporal patterns in your model’s performance over the previous year, and creating a schedule for sending serving data to the labeling service for the next year, introduces additional assumptions and risks. This option requires analyzing the historical data and model performance, and finding the patterns that can explain the variations in the model performance over time. However, this can be difficult and unreliable, as the patterns may not be consistent or predictable, and may depend on various factors that are not captured by the data. Moreover, this option requires creating a schedule based on the past patterns, which may not reflect the future changes in the data or the environment. This can lead to either sending too much or too little data to the labeling service, resulting in either wasted cost or degraded performance.

Option C: Comparing the cost of the labeling service with the lost revenue due to model performance degradation over the past year, and adjusting the frequency of model retraining accordingly, introduces additional challenges and trade-offs. This option requires estimating the cost of the labeling service and the lost revenue due to model performance degradation, which can be difficult and inaccurate, as they may depend on various factors that are not easily quantifiable or measurable. Moreover, this option requires finding the optimal balance between the cost and the performance, which can be subjective and variable, as different stakeholders may have different preferences and expectations. Furthermore, this option may not account for the potential impact of the model performance degradation on other aspects of the business, such as customer satisfaction, retention, or loyalty.

Option A is not the best answer because it requires using Apache Spark and Dataproc, which may incur additional cost and complexity for running and managing the cluster. It also requires saving the preprocessed data as CSV files in a Cloud Storage bucket, which may increase the storage cost and the data transfer latency.

Option B is not the best answer because it requires loading the data into a pandas DataFrame, which may not be scalable or efficient for large datasets. It also requires training the model directly on the DataFrame, which may not leverage the distributed computing capabilities of BigQuery.

Option C is the best answer because it allows performing preprocessing in BigQuery by using SQL, which is a cost-effective and efficient way to manipulate large datasets. It also allows using the BigQueryClient in TensorFlow to read the data directly from BigQuery, which is a convenient and fast way to access the data for training the model1.

Option D is not the best answer because it requires using Apache Beam and Dataflow, which may incur additional cost and complexity for running and managing the pipeline. It also requires saving the preprocessed data as CSV files in a Cloud Storage bucket, which may increase the storage cost and the data transfer latency.

References:

1: Read data from BigQuery | TensorFlow I/O

Vertex AI Model Monitoring is a service that allows you to monitor the performance and quality of your ML models in production. You can use Vertex AI Model Monitoring to detect changes in the input data distribution, the prediction output distribution, or the model accuracy over time. Training-serving skew detection is a feature of Vertex AI Model Monitoring that compares the statistics of the data used for training the model and the data used for serving the model. If there is a significant difference between the two data distributions, it indicates that the model might be outdated or inaccurate. By enabling training-serving skew detection for your model, you can detect model performance changes in production and trigger retraining or redeployment of your model as needed. This way, you can ensure that your model is always up-to-date and accurate, without moving your data to the cloud. References:

Vertex AI Model Monitoring documentation

Training-serving skew detection documentation

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

According to the web search results, Vertex AI is a unified platform for machine learning development and deployment. Vertex AI offers various services and tools for building, managing, and serving machine learning models1. Vertex AI allows you to deploy your models to endpoints for online prediction, and configure the compute resources and autoscaling options for your deployed models2. Autoscaling with Vertex AI endpoints is (by default) based on the CPU utilization across all cores of the machine type you have specified. The default threshold of 60% represents 60% on all cores. For example, for a 4 core machine, that means you need 240% utilization to trigger autoscaling3. Therefore, if you discover that the endpoint does not autoscale as expected when receiving multiple requests, you might need to decrease the CPU utilization target in the autoscaling configurations. This way, you can lower the threshold for triggering autoscaling and allocate more resources to handle the prediction requests. Therefore, option D is the best way to solve the problem for the given use case. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Vertex AI

Deploy a model to an endpoint

Vertex AI endpoint doesn’t scale up / down

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

Option A is incorrect because creating a one-hot encoding of words, and feeding the encodings into your model is not an efficient way to preprocess the words individually for a natural language model. One-hot encoding is a method of representing categorical variables as binary vectors, where each element corresponds to a category and only one element is 1 and the rest are 01. However, this method is not suitable for high-dimensional and sparse data, such as words in a large vocabulary, because it requires a lot of memory and computation, and does not capture the semantic similarity or relationship between words2.

Option B is correct because identifying word embeddings from a pre-trained model, and using the embeddings in your model is a good way to preprocess the words individually for a natural language model. Word embeddings are low-dimensional and dense vectors that represent the meaning and usage of words in a continuous space3. Word embeddings can be learned from a large corpus of text using neural networks, such as word2vec, GloVe, or BERT4. Using pre-trained word embeddings can save time and resources, and improve the performance of the natural language model, especially when the training data is limited or noisy5.

Option C is incorrect because sorting the words by frequency of occurrence, and using the frequencies as the encodings in your model is not a meaningful way to preprocess the words individually for a natural language model. This method implies that the frequency of a word is a good indicator of its importance or relevance, which may not be true. For example, the word “the” is very frequent but not very informative, while the word “unicorn” is rare but more distinctive. Moreover, this method does not capture the semantic similarity or relationship between words, and may introduce noise or bias into the model.

Option D is incorrect because assigning a numerical value to each word from 1 to 100,000 and feeding the values as inputs in your model is not a valid way to preprocess the words individually for a natural language model. This method implies an ordinal relationship between the words, which may not be true. For example, assigning the values 1, 2, and 3 to the words “apple”, “banana”, and “orange” does not make sense, as there is no inherent order among these fruits. Moreover, this method does not capture the semantic similarity or relationship between words, and may confuse the model with irrelevant or misleading information.

References:

One-hot encoding

Word embeddings

Word embedding

Pre-trained word embeddings

Using pre-trained word embeddings in a Keras model

[Term frequency]

[Term frequency-inverse document frequency]

[Ordinal variable]

[Encoding categorical features]

The best option to build a game recommendation model with the least amount of coding is to use BigQuery ML, which allows you to create and execute machine learning models using standard SQL queries. BigQuery ML supports several types of models, including matrix factorization, which is a common technique for collaborative filtering-based recommendation systems. Matrix factorization models learn latent factors for users and items from the observed ratings, and then use them to predict the ratings for new user-item pairs. BigQuery ML provides a built-in function called ML.RECOMMEND that can generate recommendations for a given user based on a trained matrix factorization model. To use BigQuery ML, you need to load the data in BigQuery, which is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse. You can use the bq command-line tool, the BigQuery API, or the Cloud Console to load data from Cloud Storage to BigQuery. Alternatively, you can use federated queries to query data directly from Cloud Storage without loading it to BigQuery, but this may incur additional costs and performance overhead. Option A is incorrect because BigQuery ML does not support Autoencoder models, which are a type of neural network that can learn compressed representations of the input data. Autoencoder models are not suitable for recommendation systems, as they do not capture the interactions between users and items. Option C is incorrect because using TensorFlow to train a two-tower model requires more coding than using BigQuery ML. A two-tower model is a type of neural network that learns embeddings for users and items separately, and then combines them with a dot product or a cosine similarity to compute the rating. TensorFlow is a low-level framework that requires you to define the model architecture, the loss function, the optimizer, the training loop, and the evaluation metrics. Moreover, you need to read the data from Cloud Storage to a Vertex AI Workbench notebook, which is an instance of JupyterLab that runs on a Google Cloud virtual machine. This may involve additional steps such as authentication, authorization, and data preprocessing. Option D is incorrect because using TensorFlow to train a matrix factorization model also requires more coding than using BigQuery ML. Although TensorFlow provides some high-level APIs such as Keras and TensorFlow Recommenders that can simplify the model development, you still need to handle the data loading and the model training and evaluation yourself. Furthermore, you need to read the data from Cloud Storage to a Vertex AI Workbench notebook, which may incur additional complexity and costs. References:

BigQuery ML documentation

Using matrix factorization with BigQuery ML

Recommendations AI documentation

Loading data into BigQuery

Querying data in Cloud Storage from BigQuery

Vertex AI Workbench documentation

TensorFlow documentation

TensorFlow Recommenders documentation

The most likely reason for the observed result is that the model is overfitting in areas with less traffic and underfitting in areas with more traffic. Overfitting means that the model learns the specific patterns and noise in the training data, but fails to generalize well to new and unseen data. Underfitting means that the model is not able to capture the complexity and variability of the data, and performs poorly on both training and test data. In this case, the model might have learned to segment the images well when there is less traffic, but it might not have enough data or features to handle the more challenging scenarios when there is more traffic. This could lead to a decrease in the AUC metric, which measures the ability of the model to distinguish between different classes. AUC is a suitable metric for this classification model, as it is not affected by class imbalance or threshold selection. The other options are not likely to be the reason for the result, as they are not related to the traffic density. Too much data representing congested areas would not cause the model to fail in those areas, but rather help the model learn better. Gradients vanishing or exploding is a problem that occurs during the training process, not after the deployment, and it affects the whole model, not specific scenarios. References:

Image Segmentation: U-Net For Self Driving Cars

Intelligent Semantic Segmentation for Self-Driving Vehicles Using Deep Learning

Sharing Pixelopolis, a self-driving car demo from Google I/O built with TensorFlow Lite

Google Cloud launches machine learning engineer certification

Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Certification

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

Auto scaling is a feature that allows you to automatically adjust the number of prediction nodes based on the traffic and load of your deployed model1. However, auto scaling depends on the CPU utilization of your prediction nodes, which is the percentage of CPU resources used by your model server1. If your CPU utilization is low, even during periods of high load, it means that your model server is not fully utilizing the available CPU resources, and thus auto scaling will not trigger more replicas2.

One possible reason for low CPU utilization is that your model server is using a single worker process to handle prediction requests3. A worker process is a subprocess that runs your model code and handles prediction requests3. If you have only one worker process, it can only handle one request at a time, which can lead to dropped requests when the traffic is high3. To increase the CPU utilization and the throughput of your model server, you can increase the number of worker processes, which will allow your model server to handle multiple requests in parallel3.

To increase the number of workers in your model server, you need to modify your custom model server code and use the --workers flag to specify the number of worker processes you want to use3. For example, if you are using a Gunicorn server, you can use the following command to start your model server with four worker processes:

gunicorn --bind :$PORT --workers 4 --threads 1 --timeout 60 main:app

By increasing the number of workers in your model server, you can increase the CPU utilization of your prediction nodes, and thus enable auto scaling to scale beyond one replica.

The other options are not suitable for your scenario, because they either do not address the root cause of low CPU utilization, such as attaching a GPU or scheduling scaling, or they do not enable auto scaling, such as increasing the minReplicaCount, which is a fixed number of nodes that will always run regardless of the traffic1.

References:

Scaling prediction nodes | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Troubleshooting | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Using a custom prediction routine with online prediction | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

To develop a credit risk model that meets the regulatory requirements and can be monitored over time, you should follow these steps:

Use Vertex Explainable AI with the sampled Shapley method. Vertex Explainable AI is a service that provides feature attributions for machine learning models, which can help you understand how each feature contributes to the prediction1. The sampled Shapley method is a technique that estimates the Shapley values for each feature, which are based on the marginal contribution of each feature to the prediction across all possible feature subsets2. The sampled Shapley method is suitable for neural networks and other complex models, as it can capture the non-linear and interaction effects of the features3.

Enable Vertex AI Model Monitoring to check for feature distribution drift. Vertex AI Model Monitoring is a service that helps you track and manage the performance and quality of your deployed models over time4. Feature distribution drift is a type of data drift that occurs when the distribution of the input features changes significantly from the training data, which can affect the model accuracy and reliability. By checking for feature distribution drift, you can detect when your model needs to be retrained or updated with new data.

References:

1: Introduction to Vertex Explainable AI | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

2: Shapley value - Wikipedia

3: Explainable AI: Interpreting, Explaining and Visualizing Deep Learning

4: Introduction to Vertex AI Model Monitoring | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

[5]: Monitor models for data drift | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Vertex AI Pipelines is a service that allows you to orchestrate and automate your machine learning (ML) workflows using pipelines1. A pipeline is a description of an ML workflow, including all of the components in the workflow, how the components are connected as a graph, and the runtime parameters that the pipeline accepts1. Vertex AI Pipelines helps you manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your ML projects, from data preprocessing to model deployment1.

Vertex AI Feature Store is a service that enables you to serve, share, and reuse ML features across different models and projects2. A feature is a measurable property or characteristic of an entity, such as the age of a person or the price of a product2. Vertex AI Feature Store helps you reduce data duplication, ensure data consistency, and improve model performance2.

Vertex AI Experiments is a service that helps you track and compare the performance of different versions of your models3. You can use Vertex AI Experiments to run multiple training jobs with different hyperparameters, architectures, or data sources, and then compare the results using metrics, visualizations, and reports3. Vertex AI Experiments helps you identify the best model for your use case and optimize your model performance3. References:

Vertex AI Pipelines | Google Cloud

Vertex AI Feature Store | Google Cloud

Vertex AI Experiments | Google Cloud

Z-score normalization is a technique that transforms the values of a numeric variable into standardized units, such that the mean is zero and the standard deviation is one. Z-score normalization can help to compare variables with different scales and ranges, and to reduce the effect of outliers and skewness. The formula for z-score normalization is:

z = (x - mu) / sigma

where x is the original value, mu is the mean of the variable, and sigma is the standard deviation of the variable.

Dataflow is a service that allows you to create and run data processing pipelines on Google Cloud. You can use Dataflow to preprocess raw data prior to model training and prediction, such as applying z-score normalization on data stored in BigQuery. However, using Dataflow for this task may not be the most efficient option, as it involves reading and writing data from and to BigQuery, which can be time-consuming and costly. Moreover, using Dataflow requires manual intervention to update the pipeline whenever new training data is added.

A more efficient way to perform z-score normalization on data stored in BigQuery is to translate the normalization algorithm into SQL and use it with BigQuery. BigQuery is a service that allows you to analyze large-scale and complex data using SQL queries. You can use BigQuery to perform z-score normalization on your data using SQL functions such as AVG(), STDDEV_POP(), and OVER(). For example, the following SQL query can normalize the values of a column called temperature in a table called weather:

SELECT (temperature - AVG(temperature) OVER ()) / STDDEV_POP(temperature) OVER () AS normalized_temperature FROM weather;

By using SQL to perform z-score normalization on BigQuery, you can make the process more efficient by minimizing computation time and manual intervention. You can also leverage the scalability and performance of BigQuery to handle large and complex datasets. Therefore, translating the normalization algorithm into SQL for use with BigQuery is the best option for this use case.

Option A is incorrect because converting each categorical value into an integer value is not a good way to encode categorical values with high cardinality. This method implies an ordinal relationship between the categories, which may not be true. For example, assigning the values 1, 2, and 3 to the categories “red”, “green”, and “blue” does not make sense, as there is no inherent order among these colors1.

Option B is correct because converting the categorical string data to one-hot hash buckets is a suitable way to encode categorical values with high cardinality. This method uses a hash function to map each category to a fixed-length vector of binary values, where only one element is 1 and the rest are 0. This method preserves the sparsity and independence of the categories, and reduces the dimensionality of the input space2.

Option C is incorrect because mapping the categorical variables into a vector of boolean values is not a valid way to encode categorical values with high cardinality. This method implies that each category can be represented by a combination of true/false values, which may not be possible for a large number of categories. For example, if there are 10,000 categories, then there are 2^10,000 possible combinations of boolean values, which is impractical to store and process3.

Option D is incorrect because converting each categorical value into a run-length encoded string is not a useful way to encode categorical values with high cardinality. This method compresses a string by replacing consecutive repeated characters with the character and the number of repetitions. For example, “AAAABBBCC” becomes “A4B3C2”. This method does not reduce the dimensionality of the input space, and does not preserve the semantic meaning of the categories4.

References:

Encoding categorical features

One-hot hash buckets

Boolean vector

Run-length encoding

The best option for using a managed service to submit training jobs with different frameworks is to use Vertex AI Training. Vertex AI Training is a fully managed service that allows you to train custom models on Google Cloud using any framework, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, XGBoost, etc. You can also use custom containers to run your own libraries and dependencies. Vertex AI Training handles the infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and monitoring for you, so you can focus on your model development and optimization. Vertex AI Training also integrates with other Vertex AI services, such as Vertex AI Pipelines, Vertex AI Experiments, and Vertex AI Prediction. The other options are not as suitable for using a managed service to submit training jobs with different frameworks, because:

Configuring Kubeflow to run on Google Kubernetes Engine and submit training jobs through TFJob would require more infrastructure maintenance, as Kubeflow is not a fully managed service, and you would have to provision and manage your own Kubernetes cluster. This would also incur more costs, as you would have to pay for the cluster resources, regardless of the training job usage. TFJob is also mainly designed for TensorFlow models, and might not support other frameworks as well as Vertex AI Training.

Creating a library of VM images on Compute Engine, and publishing these images on a centralized repository would require more development time and effort, as you would have to create and maintain different VM images for different frameworks and libraries. You would also have to manually configure and launch the VMs for each training job, and handle the scaling and monitoring yourself. This would not leverage the benefits of a managed service, such as Vertex AI Training.

Setting up Slurm workload manager to receive jobs that can be scheduled to run on your cloud infrastructure would require more configuration and administration, as Slurm is not a native Google Cloud service, and you would have to install and manage it on your own VMs or clusters. Slurm is also a general-purpose workload manager, and might not have the same level of integration and optimization for ML frameworks and libraries as Vertex AI Training. References:

Vertex AI Training | Google Cloud

Kubeflow on Google Cloud | Google Cloud

TFJob for training TensorFlow models with Kubernetes | Kubeflow

Compute Engine | Google Cloud

Slurm Workload Manager

AutoML Natural Language is a service that allows you to quickly build, test and deploy natural language processing (NLP) models without needing to have expertise in NLP or machine learning. You can use it to train a classifier on your corpus of written support cases, and then use the AutoML API to perform classification on new requests. Once the model is trained, it can be deployed as a REST API. This allows the classifier to be integrated into your pipeline and be easily consumed by other systems.

 AutoML Natural Language is a service that allows users to create custom natural language models using their own data and labels. It supports various natural language tasks, such as text classification, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis. AutoML Natural Language can be used to build a model to classify incoming calls by product, as it can extract custom entities from the transcribed calls and assign them to predefined categories. AutoML Natural Language also minimizes data preprocessing and development time, as it handles the data preparation, model training, and evaluation automatically. The other options are not as suitable for this scenario. AI Platform Training built-in algorithms are a set of pre-defined algorithms that can be used to train ML models on AI Platform, but they do not support natural language processing tasks. Cloud Natural Language API is a pre-trained service that provides natural language understanding capabilities, such as sentiment analysis, entity analysis, syntax analysis, and content classification. However, it does not support custom entities or categories, and may not recognize the product names from the calls. Building a custom model to identify the product keywords and then running them through a classification algorithm would require more data preprocessing and development time, as well as more coding and testing. References:

AutoML Natural Language documentation

AI Platform Training built-in algorithms documentation

Cloud Natural Language API documentation

Option A is incorrect because it does not separate the training dataset into two tables based on the features, which is necessary to train the two models separately and accurately.

Option B is incorrect because it does not separate the training dataset into two tables based on the features, and because it uses the same monitoring-config-from parameter for both models, which would not account for the different feature selections.

Option C is incorrect because it deploys the models to two separate endpoints, which would increase the management effort and complexity of the pipeline.

Option D is correct because it separates the training dataset into two tables based on the features, which would enable the two models to be trained separately and accurately. It also deploys both models to the same endpoint, which would simplify the pipeline and reduce the management effort. It also submits a Vertex Al Model Monitoring job with a monitoring-config-from parameter that accounts for the model IDs and training datasets, which would enable the skew detection to work properly for each model.

 According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “track the lineage of pipeline artifacts”. Vertex ML Metadata2 is a service that allows you to store, query, and visualize metadata associated with your ML workflows, such as datasets, models, metrics, and executions. Vertex ML Metadata helps you track the provenance and lineage of your ML artifacts and understand the relationships between them. Vertex AI Experiments3 is a service that allows you to track and compare the results of your model training runs. Vertex AI Experiments automatically logs metadata such as hyperparameters, metrics, and artifacts for each training run. You can use Vertex AI Experiments to train your custom model using TensorFlow, PyTorch, XGBoost, or scikit-learn. Vertex AI TensorBoard4 is a service that allows you to visualize and monitor your ML experiments using TensorBoard, an open source tool for ML visualization. Vertex AI TensorBoard helps you track the model’s training parameters and the metrics per training epoch, and compare the performance of each version of the model. Therefore, option C is the best way to determine which Vertex AI services to include in the workflow for the given use case. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Vertex ML Metadata

Vertex AI Experiments

Vertex AI TensorBoard

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

 In this scenario, the goal is to create an ML model to predict which newly uploaded videos will be the most popular on a video sharing website. The result that should be used to determine whether the model is successful is the one that best aligns with the business objective and the evaluation metric. Option C is the correct answer because it defines the most popular videos as the ones that have the highest watch time within 30 days of being uploaded, and it sets a high accuracy threshold of 95% for the model prediction.

Option C: The model predicts 95% of the most popular videos measured by watch time within 30 days of being uploaded. This option is the best result for the scenario because it reflects the business objective and the evaluation metric. The business objective is to prioritize the videos that will attract and retain the most viewers on the website. The watch time is a good indicator of the viewer engagement and satisfaction, as it measures how long the viewers watch the videos. The 30-day window is a reasonable time frame to capture the popularity trend of the videos, as it accounts for the initial interest and the viral potential of the videos. The 95% accuracy threshold is a high standard for the model prediction, as it means that the model can correctly identify 95 out of 100 of the most popular videos based on the watch time metric.

Option A: The model predicts videos as popular if the user who uploads them has over 10,000 likes. This option is not a good result for the scenario because it does not reflect the business objective or the evaluation metric. The business objective is to prioritize the videos that will be the most popular on the website, not the users who upload them. The number of likes that a user has is not a good indicator of the popularity of their videos, as it does not measure the viewer engagement or satisfaction with the videos. Moreover, this option does not specify a time frame or an accuracy threshold for the model prediction, making it vague and unreliable.

Option B: The model predicts 97.5% of the most popular clickbait videos measured by number of clicks. This option is not a good result for the scenario because it does not reflect the business objective or the evaluation metric. The business objective is to prioritize the videos that will be the most popular on the website, not the videos that have the most misleading or sensational titles or thumbnails. The number of clicks that a video has is not a good indicator of the popularity of the video, as it does not measure the viewer engagement or satisfaction with the video content. Moreover, this option only focuses on the clickbait videos, which may not represent the majority or the diversity of the videos on the website.

Option D: The Pearson correlation coefficient between the log-transformed number of views after 7 days and 30 days after publication is equal to 0. This option is not a good result for the scenario because it does not reflect the business objective or the evaluation metric. The business objective is to prioritize the videos that will be the most popular on the website, not the videos that have the most consistent or inconsistent number of views over time. The Pearson correlation coefficient is a metric that measures the linear relationship between two variables, not the popularity of the videos. A correlation coefficient of 0 means that there is no linear relationship between the log-transformed number of views after 7 days and 30 days, which does not indicate whether the videos are popular or not. Moreover, this option does not specify a threshold or a target value for the correlation coefficient, making it meaningless and irrelevant.

 The performance of an image classification model can be measured by various metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and mean average precision (mAP). These metrics can be calculated based on the confusion matrix, which compares the predicted labels and the true labels of the images1

One of the best ways to monitor the performance of multiple versions of an image classification model on AI Platform is to compare the mean average precision across the models using the Continuous Evaluation feature. Mean average precision is a metric that summarizes the precision and recall of a model across different confidence thresholds and classes. Mean average precision is especially useful for multi-class and multi-label image classification problems, where the model has to assign one or more labels to each image from a set of possible labels. Mean average precision can range from 0 to 1, where a higher value indicates a better performance2

Continuous Evaluation is a feature of AI Platform that allows you to automatically evaluate the performance of your deployed models using online prediction requests and responses. Continuous Evaluation can help you monitor the quality and consistency of your models over time, and detect any issues or anomalies that may affect the model performance. Continuous Evaluation can also provide various evaluation metrics and visualizations, such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, ROC curve, and confusion matrix, for different types of models, such as classification, regression, and object detection3

To compare the mean average precision across the models using the Continuous Evaluation feature, you need to do the following steps:

Enable the online prediction logging for each model version that you want to evaluate. This will allow AI Platform to collect the prediction requests and responses from your models and store them in BigQuery4

Create an evaluation job for each model version that you want to evaluate. This will allow AI Platform to compare the predicted labels and the true labels of the images, and calculate the evaluation metrics, such as mean average precision. You need to specify the BigQuery table that contains the prediction logs, the data schema, the label column, and the evaluation interval.

View the evaluation results for each model version on the AI Platform Models page in the Google Cloud console. You can see the mean average precision and other metrics for each model version over time, and compare them using charts and tables. You can also filter the results by different classes and confidence thresholds.

The other options are not as effective or feasible. Comparing the loss performance for each model on a held-out dataset or on the validation data is not a good idea, as the loss function may not reflect the actual performance of the model on the online prediction data, and may vary depending on the choice of the loss function and the optimization algorithm. Comparing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for each model using the What-If Tool is not possible, as the What-If Tool does not support image data or multi-class classification problems.

References: 1: Confusion matrix 2: Mean average precision 3: Continuous Evaluation overview 4: Configure online prediction logging : [Create an evaluation job] : [View evaluation results] : [What-If Tool overview]

 Comparing the training and evaluation losses of the current run is a good way to check if the model is overfitting or underfitting. If the losses are similar, it means that the model is generalizing well and can be deployed to a Vertex AI endpoint. Vertex AI endpoint is a service that allows you to serve your ML models online and scale them automatically. By using a training/serving skew threshold model monitoring, you can detect if there is a significant difference between the data used for training and the data used for serving. This can indicate that the model is becoming stale or inaccurate over time. When the model monitoring threshold is triggered, it means that the model needs to be retrained with the latest data. By redeploying the pipeline, you can automate the retraining process and update the model with the new data. This way, you can minimize the cost of retraining and ensure that your model is always up-to-date and accurate. References:

Vertex AI documentation

Vertex AI endpoint documentation

Model monitoring documentation

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “explain the predictions of a trained model”. Vertex AI provides feature attributions using Shapley Values, a cooperative game theory algorithm that assigns credit to each feature in a model for a particular outcome2. Feature attributions can help you understand how the model calculates the predictions and debug or optimize the model accordingly. You can use AutoML for Tabular Data to generate and query local feature attributions3. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Feature attributions for classification and regression

AutoML for Tabular Data

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

 A TPU VM is a virtual machine that has direct access to a Cloud TPU device. TPU VMs provide a simpler and more flexible way to use Cloud TPUs, as they eliminate the need for a separate host VM and network setup. TPU VMs also support interactive debugging tools such as TensorFlow Debugger (tfdbg) and Python Debugger (pdb), which can help researchers develop and troubleshoot complex models. A v3-8 TPU VM has 8 TPU cores, which can provide high performance and scalability for training large models. SSHing into the TPU VM allows the user to run and debug the TensorFlow code directly on the TPU device, without any network overhead or data transfer issues. References:

1: TPU VMs Overview

2: TPU VMs Quickstart

3: Debugging TensorFlow Models on Cloud TPUs

 The Cloud DLP API is a service that allows users to inspect, classify, and de-identify sensitive data. It can be used to scan data in Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Pub/Sub. The best way to ensure that the PII is not accessible by unauthorized individuals is to use a quarantine bucket to store the data before scanning it with the DLP API. This way, the data is isolated from other applications and users until it is classified and moved to the appropriate bucket. The other options are not as secure or efficient, as they either expose the data to BigQuery before scanning, or scan the data after writing it to a non-sensitive bucket. References:

Cloud DLP documentation

Scanning and classifying Cloud Storage files

According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “design, build, and productionalize ML models to solve business challenges using Google Cloud technologies”. TensorFlow Transform2 is a library for preprocessing data with TensorFlow. TensorFlow Transform enables you to define and execute distributed pre-processing or feature engineering functions on large data sets, and then export the same functions as a TensorFlow graph for re-use during training or serving. TensorFlow Transform can handle both instance-level and full-pass data transformations. Apache Beam3 is an open source framework for building scalable and portable data pipelines. Apache Beam supports both batch and streaming data processing. Dataflow4 is a fully managed service for running Apache Beam pipelines on Google Cloud. Dataflow handles the provisioning and management of the compute resources, as well as the optimization and execution of the pipelines. Therefore, option D is the best way to configure the preprocessing routine for the given use case, as it allows you to use the same preprocessing logic during model training and serving, and leverage the scalability and performance of Dataflow. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

TensorFlow Transform

Apache Beam

Dataflow

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

TFX ModelValidator is a tool that allows you to compare new models against a baseline model and evaluate their performance on different metrics and data slices1. You can use this tool to validate your models before deploying them to production and ensure that they meet your expectations and requirements.

k-fold cross-validation is a technique that splits the data into k subsets and trains the model on k-1 subsets while testing it on the remaining subset. This is repeated k times and the average performance is reported2. This technique is useful for estimating the generalization error of a model, but it does not account for the dynamic nature of customer behavior or the potential changes in data distribution over time.

Using the last relevant week of data as a validation set is a simple way to check the model’s performance on recent data, but it may not be representative of the entire data or capture the long-term trends and patterns. It also does not allow you to compare the model with a baseline or evaluate it on different data slices.

Using the entire dataset and treating the AUC ROC as the main metric is not a good practice because it does not leave any data for validation or testing. It also assumes that the AUC ROC is the only metric that matters, which may not be true for your business problem. You may want to consider other metrics such as precision, recall, or revenue.

The performance of a DNN regression model can degrade over time due to a change in the distribution of the input data. This phenomenon is known as data drift or concept drift, and it can affect the accuracy and reliability of the model predictions. Data drift can be caused by various factors, such as seasonal changes, population shifts, market trends, or external events1

To address the input differences in production, one should create alerts to monitor for skew, and retrain the model. Skew is a measure of how much the input data in production differs from the input data used for training the model. Skew can be detected by comparing the statistics and distributions of the input features in the training and production data, such as mean, standard deviation, histogram, or quantiles. Alerts can be set up to notify the model developers or operators when the skew exceeds a certain threshold, indicating a significant change in the input data2

When an alert is triggered, the model should be retrained with the latest data that reflects the current distribution of the input features. Retraining the model can help the model adapt to the new data and improve its performance. Retraining the model can be done manually or automatically, depending on the frequency and severity of the data drift. Retraining the model can also involve updating the model architecture, hyperparameters, or optimization algorithm, if necessary3

The other options are not as effective or feasible. Performing feature selection on the model and retraining the model with fewer features is not a good idea, as it may reduce the expressiveness and complexity of the model, and ignore some important features that may affect the output. Retraining the model and selecting an L2 regularization parameter with a hyperparameter tuning service is not relevant, as L2 regularization is a technique to prevent overfitting, not data drift. Retraining the model on a monthly basis with fewer features is not optimal, as it may not capture the timely changes in the input data, and may compromise the model performance.

References: 1: Data drift detection for machine learning models 2: Skew and drift detection 3: Retraining machine learning models

 Online inference is a process where you send a single or a small number of prediction requests to a model and get immediate responses1. Online inference is suitable for scenarios where you need timely predictions, such as detecting cheating in online games. Online inference requires that the model is deployed to an endpoint, which is a resource that provides a service URL for prediction requests2.

Vertex AI Model Registry is a central repository where you can manage the lifecycle of your ML models3. You can import models from various sources, such as custom models or AutoML models, and assign them to different versions and aliases3. You can also deploy models to endpoints, which are resources that provide a service URL for online prediction2.

By importing the model into Vertex AI Model Registry, you can leverage the Vertex AI features to monitor and update the model3. You can use Vertex AI Experiments to track and compare the metrics of different model versions, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC. You can also use Vertex AI Explainable AI to generate feature attributions that show how much each input feature contributed to the model’s prediction.

By creating a Vertex AI endpoint that hosts the model, you can use the Vertex AI Prediction service to serve online inference requests2. Vertex AI Prediction provides various benefits, such as scalability, reliability, security, and logging2. You can use the Vertex AI API or the Google Cloud console to send online inference requests to the endpoint and get immediate classifications4.

Therefore, the best option for your scenario is to import the model into Vertex AI Model Registry, create a Vertex AI endpoint that hosts the model, and make online inference requests.

The other options are not suitable for your scenario, because they either do not provide immediate classifications, such as using batch prediction or loading the model files each time, or they do not use Vertex AI Prediction, which would require more development and maintenance effort, such as creating a Cloud Function or a VM.

References:

Online versus batch prediction | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Deploy a model to an endpoint | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Introduction to Vertex AI Model Registry | Google Cloud

Get online predictions | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

 Hyperparameter tuning is the process of finding the optimal values for the parameters of a machine learning model that affect its performance. AI Platform provides a service for hyperparameter tuning that can run multiple trials in parallel and use different search algorithms to find the best combination of hyperparameters. However, hyperparameter tuning can be time-consuming and costly, especially if the search space is large and the model training is complex. Therefore, it is important to optimize the tuning job to reduce the time and resources required.

One way to speed up the tuning job is to set the early stopping parameter to TRUE. This means that the tuning service will automatically stop trials that are unlikely to perform well based on the intermediate results. This can save time and resources by avoiding unnecessary computations for trials that are not promising. The early stopping parameter can be set in the trainingInput.hyperparameters field of the training job request1

Another way to speed up the tuning job is to decrease the maximum number of trials during subsequent training phases. This means that the tuning service will use fewer trials to refine the search space after the initial phase. This can reduce the time required for the tuning job to converge to the optimal solution. The maximum number of trials can be set in the trainingInput.hyperparameters.maxTrials field of the training job request1

The other options are not effective ways to speed up the tuning job. Decreasing the number of parallel trials will reduce the concurrency of the tuning job and increase the overall time required. Decreasing the range of floating-point values will reduce the diversity of the search space and may miss some optimal solutions. Changing the search algorithm from Bayesian search to random search will reduce the efficiency of the tuning job and may require more trials to find the best solution1

References: 1: Hyperparameter tuning overview

The best way to operationalize your training process is to use Vertex AI Pipelines, which allows you to create and run scalable, portable, and reproducible workflows for your ML models. Vertex AI Pipelines also integrates with Vertex AI Metadata, which tracks the provenance, lineage, and artifacts of your ML models. By using a Vertex AI CustomTrainingJobOp component, you can train your model using the same code as in your Jupyter notebook. By using a ModelUploadOp component, you can upload your trained model to Vertex AI Model Registry, which manages the versions and endpoints of your models. By using Cloud Scheduler and Cloud Functions, you can trigger your Vertex AI pipeline to run weekly, according to your plan. References:

Vertex AI Pipelines documentation

Vertex AI Metadata documentation

Vertex AI CustomTrainingJobOp documentation

ModelUploadOp documentation

Cloud Scheduler documentation

[Cloud Functions documentation]

Vertex ML Metadata is a service that lets you track and manage the metadata produced by your ML workflows in a centralized way. It helps you have reproducible experiments by generating artifacts that represent the data, parameters, and metrics used or produced by your ML system. You can also analyze the lineage and performance of your ML artifacts using Vertex ML Metadata.

Some of the benefits of using Vertex ML Metadata are:

It captures your ML system’s metadata as a graph, where artifacts and executions are nodes, and events are edges that link them as inputs or outputs.

It allows you to create contexts to group sets of artifacts and executions together, such as experiments, runs, or projects.

It supports querying and filtering the metadata using the Vertex AI SDK for Python or REST commands.

It integrates with other Vertex AI services, such as Vertex AI Pipelines and Vertex AI Experiments, to automatically log metadata and artifacts.

The other options are not suitable for tracking and managing ML metadata in a centralized way.

Option A: Storing your tf.logging data in BigQuery is not enough to capture the full metadata of your ML system, such as the artifacts and their lineage. BigQuery is a data warehouse service that is mainly used for analytics and reporting, not for metadata management.

Option B: Managing all relational entities in the Hive Metastore is not a good solution for ML metadata, as it is designed for storing metadata of Hive tables and partitions, not for ML artifacts and executions. Hive Metastore is a component of the Apache Hive project, which is a data warehouse system for querying and analyzing large datasets stored in Hadoop.

Option C: Storing all ML metadata in Google Cloud’s operations suite is not a feasible option, as it is a set of tools for monitoring, logging, tracing, and debugging your applications and infrastructure, not for ML metadata. Google Cloud’s operations suite does not provide the features and integrations that Vertex ML Metadata offers for ML workflows.

 A data pipeline is a set of steps or processes that move data from one or more sources to one or more destinations, usually for the purpose of analysis, transformation, or storage. A data pipeline can be designed using various components, such as data sources, data processing tools, data storage systems, and data analytics tools1

To design a data pipeline for analyzing customer sentiments in each call, one should consider the following requirements and constraints:

The call center receives over one million calls daily, and data is stored in Cloud Storage. This implies that the data is large, unstructured, and distributed, and requires a scalable and efficient data processing tool that can handle various types of data formats, such as audio, text, or image.

The data collected must not leave the region in which the call originated, and no Personally Identifiable Information (Pll) can be stored or analyzed. This implies that the data is sensitive and subject to data privacy and compliance regulations, and requires a secure and reliable data storage system that can enforce data encryption, access control, and regional policies.

The data science team has a third-party tool for visualization and access which requires a SQL ANSI-2011 compliant interface. This implies that the data analytics tool is external and independent of the data pipeline, and requires a standard and compatible data interface that can support SQL queries and operations.

One of the best options for selecting components for data processing and for analytics is to use Dataflow for data processing and BigQuery for analytics. Dataflow is a fully managed service for executing Apache Beam pipelines for data processing, such as batch or stream processing, extract-transform-load (ETL), or data integration. BigQuery is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse that allows you to run fast and complex queries on large-scale data23

Using Dataflow and BigQuery has several advantages for this use case:

Dataflow can process large and unstructured data from Cloud Storage in a parallel and distributed manner, and apply various transformations, such as converting audio to text, extracting sentiment scores, or anonymizing PII. Dataflow can also handle both batch and stream processing, which can enable real-time or near-real-time analysis of the call data.

BigQuery can store and analyze the processed data from Dataflow in a secure and reliable way, and enforce data encryption, access control, and regional policies. BigQuery can also support SQL ANSI-2011 compliant interface, which can enable the data science team to use their third-party tool for visualization and access. BigQuery can also integrate with various Google Cloud services and tools, such as AI Platform, Data Studio, or Looker.

Dataflow and BigQuery can work seamlessly together, as they are both part of the Google Cloud ecosystem, and support various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Avro, or Parquet. Dataflow and BigQuery can also leverage the benefits of Google Cloud infrastructure, such as scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.

The other options are not as suitable or feasible. Using Pub/Sub for data processing and Datastore for analytics is not ideal, as Pub/Sub is mainly designed for event-driven and asynchronous messaging, not data processing, and Datastore is mainly designed for low-latency and high-throughput key-value operations, not analytics. Using Cloud Function for data processing and Cloud SQL for analytics is not optimal, as Cloud Function has limitations on the memory, CPU, and execution time, and does not support complex data processing, and Cloud SQL is a relational database service that may not scale well for large-scale data. Using Cloud Composer for data processing and Cloud SQL for analytics is not relevant, as Cloud Composer is mainly designed for orchestrating complex workflows across multiple systems, not data processing, and Cloud SQL is a relational database service that may not scale well for large-scale data.

References: 1: Data pipeline 2: Dataflow overview 3: BigQuery overview : [Dataflow documentation] : [BigQuery documentation]

The best hardware to choose for your model while minimizing cost is a Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks instance running on an n1-standard-16 with a preemptible v3-8 TPU. This hardware configuration can provide you with high performance, scalability, and efficiency for your TensorFlow model, as well as low cost and flexibility for your long-running and checkpointing process. The v3-8 TPU is a cloud tensor processing unit (TPU) device, which is a custom ASIC chip designed by Google to accelerate ML workloads. It can handle large and complex models and datasets, and offer fast and stable training and inference. The n1-standard-16 is a general-purpose VM that can support the CPU and memory requirements of your model, as well as the data preprocessing and postprocessing tasks. By choosing a preemptible v3-8 TPU, you can take advantage of the lower price and availability of the TPU devices, as long as you can tolerate the possibility of the device being reclaimed by Google at any time. However, since you have built frequent checkpointing into your training process, you can resume your model from the last saved state, and avoid losing any progress or data. Moreover, you can use the Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks to create and manage your notebooks instances, and leverage the integration with Vertex AI and other Google Cloud services.

The other options are not optimal for the following reasons:

A. A Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks instance running on an n1-standard-16 with 4 NVIDIA P100 GPUs is not a good option, as it has higher cost and lower performance than the v3-8 TPU. The NVIDIA P100 GPUs are the previous generation of GPUs from NVIDIA, which have lower performance, scalability, and efficiency than the latest NVIDIA A100 GPUs or the TPUs. They also have higher price and lower availability than the preemptible TPUs, which can increase the cost and complexity of your solution.

B. A Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks instance running on an n1-standard-16 with an NVIDIA P100 GPU is not a good option, as it has higher cost and lower performance than the v3-8 TPU. It also has less GPU memory and compute power than the option with 4 NVIDIA P100 GPUs, which can limit the size and complexity of your model, and affect the training and inference speed and quality.

C. A Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks instance running on an n1-standard-16 with a non-preemptible v3-8 TPU is not a good option, as it has higher cost and lower flexibility than the preemptible v3-8 TPU. The non-preemptible v3-8 TPU has the same performance, scalability, and efficiency as the preemptible v3-8 TPU, but it has higher price and lower availability, as it is reserved for your exclusive use. Moreover, since your model is long-running and checkpointing, you do not need the guarantee of the device not being reclaimed by Google, and you can benefit from the lower cost and higher availability of the preemptible v3-8 TPU.

References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

Google Cloud launches machine learning engineer certification

Cloud TPU

Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks

Preemptible VMs

NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU

 A predict request is a way to send data to a trained model and get predictions in return. A predict request can be written in different formats, such as JSON, protobuf, or gRPC, depending on the service and the platform that are used to host and serve the model. A predict request usually contains the following information:

The signature name: This is the name of the signature that defines the inputs and outputs of the model. A signature is a way to specify the expected format, type, and shape of the data that the model can accept and produce. A signature can be specified when exporting or saving the model, or it can be automatically inferred by the service or the platform. A model can have multiple signatures, but only one can be used for each predict request.

The instances: This is the data that is sent to the model for prediction. The instances can be a single instance or a batch of instances, depending on the size and shape of the data. The instances should match the input specification of the signature, such as the number, name, and type of the input tensors.

For the use case of training a text classification model, the correct way to write the predict request is D. data = json.dumps({“signature_name”: “serving_default”, “instances”: [[‘a’, ‘b’], [‘c’, ‘d’], [‘e’, ‘f’]]})

This option involves writing the predict request in JSON format, which is a common and convenient format for sending and receiving data over the web. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and it is a way to represent data as a collection of name-value pairs or an ordered list of values. JSON can be easily converted to and from Python objects using the json module.

This option also involves using the signature name “serving_default”, which is the default signature name that is assigned to the model when it is saved or exported without specifying a custom signature name. The serving_default signature defines the input and output tensors of the model based on the SignatureDef that is shown in the image. According to the SignatureDef, the model expects an input tensor called “text” that has a shape of (-1, 2) and a type of DT_STRING, and produces an output tensor called “softmax” that has a shape of (-1, 2) and a type of DT_FLOAT. The -1 in the shape indicates that the dimension can vary depending on the number of instances, and the 2 indicates that the dimension is fixed at 2. The DT_STRING and DT_FLOAT indicate that the data type is string and float, respectively.

This option also involves sending a batch of three instances to the model for prediction. Each instance is a list of two strings, such as [‘a’, ‘b’], [‘c’, ‘d’], or [‘e’, ‘f’]. These instances match the input specification of the signature, as they have a shape of (3, 2) and a type of string. The model will process these instances and produce a batch of three predictions, each with a softmax output that has a shape of (1, 2) and a type of float. The softmax output is a probability distribution over the two possible classes that the model can predict, such as positive or negative sentiment.

Therefore, writing the predict request as data = json.dumps({“signature_name”: “serving_default”, “instances”: [[‘a’, ‘b’], [‘c’, ‘d’], [‘e’, ‘f’]]}) is the correct and valid way to send data to the text classification model and get predictions in return.

References:

[json — JSON encoder and decoder]

The best business metric to track to measure the model’s performance is user engagement as measured by the number of battles played daily per user. This metric reflects the main goal of the model, which is to enhance the user experience and satisfaction by creating balanced and fair battles. If the model is successful, it should increase the user retention and loyalty, as well as the word-of-mouth and referrals. This metric is also easy to measure and interpret, as it can be directly obtained from the user activity data.

The other options are not optimal for the following reasons:

A. Average time players wait before being assigned to a team is not a good metric, as it does not capture the quality or outcome of the battles. It only measures the efficiency of the model, which is not the primary objective. Moreover, this metric can be influenced by external factors, such as the availability and demand of players, the network latency, and the server capacity.

B. Precision and recall of assigning players to teams based on their predicted versus actual ability is not a good metric, as it is difficult to measure and interpret. It requires having a reliable and consistent way of estimating the player’s ability, which can be subjective and dynamic. It also requires having a ground truth label for each assignment, which can be costly and impractical to obtain. Moreover, this metric does not reflect the user feedback or satisfaction, which is the ultimate goal of the model.

D. Rate of return as measured by additional revenue generated minus the cost of developing a new model is not a good metric, as it is not directly related to the model’s performance. It measures the profitability of the model, which is a secondary objective. Moreover, this metric can be affected by many other factors, such as the market conditions, the pricing strategy, the marketing campaigns, and the competition.

References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

Google Cloud launches machine learning engineer certification

How to measure user engagement

How to choose the right metrics for your machine learning model

Option A is incorrect because training local surrogate models to explain individual predictions is not a feature of Vertex Explainable AI, but rather a general technique for interpreting black-box models. Local surrogate models are simpler models that approximate the behavior of the original model around a specific input1.

Option B is correct because configuring sampled Shapley explanations on Vertex Explainable AI is a way to explain the difference between the actual prediction and the average prediction for a given input. Sampled Shapley explanations are based on the Shapley value, which is a game-theoretic concept that measures how much each feature contributes to the prediction2. Vertex Explainable AI supports sampled Shapley explanations for tabular data, such as customer churn3.

Option C is incorrect because configuring integrated gradients explanations on Vertex Explainable AI is not suitable for explaining the difference between the actual prediction and the average prediction for a given input. Integrated gradients explanations are based on the idea of computing the gradients of the prediction with respect to the input features along a path from a baseline input to the actual input4. Vertex Explainable AI supports integrated gradients explanations for image and text data, but not for tabular data3.

Option D is incorrect because measuring the effect of each feature as the weight of the feature multiplied by the feature value is not a valid way to explain the difference between the actual prediction and the average prediction for a given input. This method assumes that the model is linear and additive, which is not the case for an ensemble of trees and neural networks. Moreover, this method does not account for the interactions between features or the non-linearity of the model5.

References:

Local surrogate models

Shapley value

Vertex Explainable AI overview

Integrated gradients

Feature importance

Option A is incorrect because using batch prediction mode instead of online mode does not solve the “Out of Memory” error, but rather changes the latency and throughput of the prediction service. Batch prediction mode is suitable for large-scale, asynchronous, and non-urgent predictions, while online prediction mode is suitable for low-latency, synchronous, and real-time predictions1.

Option B is correct because sending the request again with a smaller batch of instances can reduce the memory consumption of the prediction service and avoid the “Out of Memory” error. The batch size is the number of instances that are processed together in one request. A smaller batch size means less data to load into memory at once2.

Option C is incorrect because using base64 to encode your data before using it for prediction does not reduce the memory consumption of the prediction service, but rather increases it. Base64 encoding is a way of representing binary data as ASCII characters, which increases the size of the data by about 33%3. Base64 encoding is only required for certain data types, such as images and audio, that cannot be represented as JSON or CSV4.

Option D is incorrect because applying for a quota increase for the number of prediction requests does not solve the “Out of Memory” error, but rather increases the number of requests that can be sent to the prediction service per day. Quotas are limits on the usage of Google Cloud resources, such as CPU, memory, disk, and network5. Quotas do not affect the performance of the prediction service, but rather the availability and cost of the service.

References:

Choosing between online and batch prediction

Online prediction input data

Base64 encoding

Preparing data for prediction

Quotas and limits

The best option for deploying a scikit-learn classification model to production is to deploy an online Vertex AI prediction endpoint and set the max replica count to 100. This option allows you to leverage the power and scalability of Google Cloud to serve requests 24/7 and handle millions of requests per second. Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and deploying machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. Vertex AI can deploy a trained scikit-learn model to an online prediction endpoint, which can provide low-latency predictions for individual instances. An online prediction endpoint consists of one or more replicas, which are copies of the model that run on virtual machines. The max replica count is a parameter that determines the maximum number of replicas that can be created for the endpoint. By setting the max replica count to 100, you can enable the endpoint to scale up to 100 replicas when the traffic increases, and scale down to zero replicas when the traffic decreases. This can help minimize the cost of deployment, as you only pay for the resources that you use. Moreover, you can use the autoscaling algorithm option to optimize the scaling behavior of the endpoint based on the latency and utilization metrics1.

The other options are not as good as option B, for the following reasons:

Option A: Deploying an online Vertex AI prediction endpoint and setting the max replica count to 1 would not be able to serve requests 24/7 and handle millions of requests per second. Setting the max replica count to 1 would limit the endpoint to only one replica, which can cause performance issues and service disruptions when the traffic increases. Moreover, setting the max replica count to 1 would prevent the endpoint from scaling down to zero replicas when the traffic decreases, which can increase the cost of deployment, as you pay for the resources that you do not use1.

Option C: Deploying an online Vertex AI prediction endpoint with one GPU per replica and setting the max replica count to 1 would not be able to serve requests 24/7 and handle millions of requests per second, and would increase the cost of deployment. Adding a GPU to each replica would increase the computational power of the endpoint, but it would also increase the cost of deployment, as GPUs are more expensive than CPUs. Moreover, setting the max replica count to 1 would limit the endpoint to only one replica, which can cause performance issues and service disruptions when the traffic increases, and prevent the endpoint from scaling down to zero replicas when the traffic decreases1. Furthermore, scikit-learn models do not benefit from GPUs, as scikit-learn is not optimized for GPU acceleration2.

Option D: Deploying an online Vertex AI prediction endpoint with one GPU per replica and setting the max replica count to 100 would be able to serve requests 24/7 and handle millions of requests per second, but it would increase the cost of deployment. Adding a GPU to each replica would increase the computational power of the endpoint, but it would also increase the cost of deployment, as GPUs are more expensive than CPUs. Setting the max replica count to 100 would enable the endpoint to scale up to 100 replicas when the traffic increases, and scale down to zero replicas when the traffic decreases, which can help minimize the cost of deployment. However, scikit-learn models do not benefit from GPUs, as scikit-learn is not optimized for GPU acceleration2. Therefore, using GPUs for scikit-learn models would be unnecessary and wasteful.

References:

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer, Course 3: Production ML Systems, Week 2: Serving ML Predictions

Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer Exam Guide, Section 3: Scaling ML models in production, 3.1 Deploying ML models to production

Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Engineer Study Guide, Chapter 6: Production ML Systems, Section 6.2: Serving ML Predictions

Online prediction

Scaling online prediction

scikit-learn FAQ

Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and managing machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. It provides various services and tools for different stages of the machine learning lifecycle, such as data preparation, model training, deployment, monitoring, and experimentation. Vertex AI Workbench is an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows you to create and run Jupyter notebooks on Google Cloud. You can use Vertex AI Workbench to develop your ML model in Python, using libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, etc. You can also use the Vertex SDK, which is a Python client library for Vertex AI, to track artifacts and compare models during experimentation. You can use the aiplatform.init function to initialize the Vertex SDK with the name of your experiment. You can use the aiplatform.start_run and aiplatform.end_run functions to create and close an experiment run. You can use the aiplatform.log_params and aiplatform.log_metrics functions to log the parameters and metrics for each experiment run. You can also use the aiplatform.log_datasets and aiplatform.log_model functions to attach the dataset and model artifacts as inputs and outputs to each experiment run. These functions allow you to record and store the metadata and artifacts of your experiments, and compare them using the Vertex AI Experiments UI. After a successful experiment, you can create a Vertex AI pipeline, which is a way to automate and orchestrate your ML workflows. You can use the aiplatform.PipelineJob class to create a pipeline job, and specify the components and dependencies of your pipeline. You can also use the aiplatform.CustomContainerTrainingJob class to create a custom container training job, and use the run method to run the job as a pipeline component. You can use the aiplatform.Model.deploy method to deploy your model as a pipeline component. You can also use the aiplatform.Model.monitor method to monitor your model as a pipeline component. By creating a Vertex AI pipeline, you can rapidly and easily transition successful experiments to production, and reuse and share your ML workflows. This solution requires minimal changes to your code, and leverages the Vertex AI services and tools to streamline your ML development process. References: The answer can be verified from official Google Cloud documentation and resources related to Vertex AI, Vertex AI Workbench, Vertex SDK, and Vertex AI pipelines.

Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Vertex AI Workbench | Google Cloud

Vertex SDK for Python | Google Cloud

Vertex AI pipelines | Google Cloud

Option A is correct because using Vertex AI Workbench user-managed notebooks to generate the report is the best way to quickly determine whether the data is suitable for model development, and to create a one-time report that includes both informative visualizations of data distributions and more sophisticated statistical analyses to share with other ML engineers on your team. Vertex AI Workbench is a service that allows you to create and use notebooks for ML development and experimentation. You can use Vertex AI Workbench to connect to your BigQuery table, query and analyze the data using SQL or Python, and create interactive charts and plots using libraries such as pandas, matplotlib, or seaborn. You can also use Vertex AI Workbench to perform more advanced data analysis, such as outlier detection, feature engineering, or hypothesis testing, using libraries such as TensorFlow Data Validation, TensorFlow Transform, or SciPy. You can export your notebook as a PDF or HTML file, and share it with your team. Vertex AI Workbench provides maximum flexibility to create your report, as you can use any code or library that you want, and customize the report as you wish.

Option B is incorrect because using Google Data Studio to create the report is not the most flexible way to quickly determine whether the data is suitable for model development, and to create a one-time report that includes both informative visualizations of data distributions and more sophisticated statistical analyses to share with other ML engineers on your team. Google Data Studio is a service that allows you to create and share interactive dashboards and reports using data from various sources, such as BigQuery, Google Sheets, or Google Analytics. You can use Google Data Studio to connect to your BigQuery table, explore and visualize the data using charts, tables, or maps, and apply filters, calculations, or aggregations to the data. However, Google Data Studio does not support more sophisticated statistical analyses, such as outlier detection, feature engineering, or hypothesis testing, which may be useful for model development. Moreover, Google Data Studio is more suitable for creating recurring reports that need to be updated frequently, rather than one-time reports that are static.

Option C is incorrect because using the output from TensorFlow Data Validation on Dataflow to generate the report is not the most efficient way to quickly determine whether the data is suitable for model development, and to create a one-time report that includes both informative visualizations of data distributions and more sophisticated statistical analyses to share with other ML engineers on your team. TensorFlow Data Validation is a library that allows you to explore, validate, and monitor the quality of your data for ML. You can use TensorFlow Data Validation to compute descriptive statistics, detect anomalies, infer schemas, and generate data visualizations for your data. Dataflow is a service that allows you to create and run scalable data processing pipelines using Apache Beam. You can use Dataflow to run TensorFlow Data Validation on large datasets, such as those stored in BigQuery. However, this option is not very efficient, as it involves moving the data from BigQuery to Dataflow, creating and running the pipeline, and exporting the results. Moreover, this option does not provide maximum flexibility to create your report, as you are limited by the functionalities of TensorFlow Data Validation, and you may not be able to customize the report as you wish.

Option D is incorrect because using Dataprep to create the report is not the most flexible way to quickly determine whether the data is suitable for model development, and to create a one-time report that includes both informative visualizations of data distributions and more sophisticated statistical analyses to share with other ML engineers on your team. Dataprep is a service that allows you to explore, clean, and transform your data for analysis or ML. You can use Dataprep to connect to your BigQuery table, inspect and profile the data using histograms, charts, or summary statistics, and apply transformations, such as filtering, joining, splitting, or aggregating, to the data. However, Dataprep does not support more sophisticated statistical analyses, such as outlier detection, feature engineering, or hypothesis testing, which may be useful for model development. Moreover, Dataprep is more suitable for creating data preparation workflows that need to be executed repeatedly, rather than one-time reports that are static.

References:

Vertex AI Workbench documentation

Google Data Studio documentation

TensorFlow Data Validation documentation

Dataflow documentation

Dataprep documentation

[BigQuery documentation]

[pandas documentation]

[matplotlib documentation]

[seaborn documentation]

[TensorFlow Transform documentation]

[SciPy documentation]

[Apache Beam documentation]

The simplest and most efficient approach for preparing the data for AutoML is to use BigQuery and Vertex AI. BigQuery is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse that can perform fast and interactive queries on large datasets. BigQuery can preprocess the data by using SQL functions such as filtering, aggregating, joining, transforming, and creating new features. The preprocessed data can be stored in a new table in BigQuery, which can be used as the data source for Vertex AI. Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and deploying machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. Vertex AI can create a managed dataset from a BigQuery table, which can be used to train an AutoML model. Vertex AI can also evaluate, deploy, and monitor the AutoML model, and provide online or batch predictions. By using BigQuery and Vertex AI, users can leverage the power and simplicity of Google Cloud to train an AutoML model to predict house prices.

The other options are not as simple or efficient as option A, for the following reasons:

Option B: Using Dataflow to preprocess the data and write the output in TFRecord format to a Cloud Storage bucket would require more steps and resources than using BigQuery and Vertex AI. Dataflow is a service that can create scalable and reliable pipelines to process large volumes of data from various sources. Dataflow can preprocess the data by using Apache Beam, a programming model for defining and executing data processing workflows. TFRecord is a binary file format that can store sequential data efficiently. However, using Dataflow and TFRecord would require writing code, setting up a pipeline, choosing a runner, and managing the output files. Moreover, TFRecord is not a supported format for Vertex AI managed datasets, so the data would need to be converted to CSV or JSONL files before creating a Vertex AI managed dataset.

Option C: Writing a query that preprocesses the data by using BigQuery and exporting the query results as CSV files would require more steps and storage than using BigQuery and Vertex AI. CSV is a text file format that can store tabular data in a comma-separated format. Exporting the query results as CSV files would require choosing a destination Cloud Storage bucket, specifying a file name or a wildcard, and setting the export options. Moreover, CSV files can have limitations such as size, schema, and encoding, which can affect the quality and validity of the data. Exporting the data as CSV files would also incur additional storage costs and reduce the performance of the queries.

Option D: Using a Vertex AI Workbench notebook instance to preprocess the data by using the pandas library and exporting the data as CSV files would require more steps and skills than using BigQuery and Vertex AI. Vertex AI Workbench is a service that provides an integrated development environment for data science and machine learning. Vertex AI Workbench allows users to create and run Jupyter notebooks on Google Cloud, and access various tools and libraries for data analysis and machine learning. Pandas is a popular Python library that can manipulate and analyze data in a tabular format. However, using Vertex AI Workbench and pandas would require creating a notebook instance, writing Python code, installing and importing pandas, connecting to BigQuery, loading and preprocessing the data, and exporting the data as CSV files. Moreover, pandas can have limitations such as memory usage, scalability, and compatibility, which can affect the efficiency and reliability of the data processing.

References:

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer, Course 2: Data Engineering for ML on Google Cloud, Week 1: Introduction to Data Engineering for ML

Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer Exam Guide, Section 1: Architecting low-code ML solutions, 1.3 Training models by using AutoML

Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Machine Learning Engineer Study Guide, Chapter 4: Low-code ML Solutions, Section 4.3: AutoML

BigQuery

Vertex AI

Dataflow

TFRecord

CSV

Vertex AI Workbench

Pandas

Option A is correct because importing the TensorFlow model with BigQuery ML, and running the ml.predict function is the easiest way to execute a batch prediction on a large BigQuery table with a custom TensorFlow model, and store the predicted results in another BigQuery table. BigQuery ML allows you to import TensorFlow models that are stored in Cloud Storage, and use them for prediction with SQL queries1. The ml.predict function returns a table with the predicted values, which can be saved to another BigQuery table2.

Option B is incorrect because using the TensorFlow BigQuery reader to load the data, and using the BigQuery API to write the results to BigQuery requires more effort to build the inference pipeline than option A. The TensorFlow BigQuery reader is a way to read data from BigQuery into TensorFlow datasets, which can be used for training or prediction3. However, this option also requires writing code to load the TensorFlow model, run the prediction, and use the BigQuery API to write the results back to BigQuery4.

Option C is incorrect because creating a Dataflow pipeline to convert the data in BigQuery to TFRecords, running a batch inference on Vertex AI Prediction, and writing the results to BigQuery requires more effort to build the inference pipeline than option A. Dataflow is a service for creating and running data processing pipelines, such as ETL (extract, transform, load) or batch processing5. Vertex AI Prediction is a service for deploying and serving ML models for online or batch prediction. However, this option also requires writing code to create the Dataflow pipeline, convert the data to TFRecords, run the batch inference, and write the results to BigQuery.

Option D is incorrect because loading the TensorFlow SavedModel in a Dataflow pipeline, using the BigQuery I/O connector with a custom function to perform the inference within the pipeline, and writing the results to BigQuery requires more effort to build the inference pipeline than option A. The BigQuery I/O connector is a way to read and write data from BigQuery within a Dataflow pipeline. However, this option also requires writing code to load the TensorFlow SavedModel, create the custom function for inference, and write the results to BigQuery.

References:

Importing models into BigQuery ML

Using imported models for prediction

TensorFlow BigQuery reader

BigQuery API

Dataflow overview

[Vertex AI Prediction overview]

[Batch prediction with Dataflow]

[BigQuery I/O connector]

[Using TensorFlow models in Dataflow]

Kubeflow Pipelines is a service that allows you to create and run machine learning workflows on Google Cloud using various features, model architectures, and hyperparameters. You can use Kubeflow Pipelines to scale up your workflows, leverage distributed training, and access specialized hardware such as GPUs and TPUs1. An experiment in Kubeflow Pipelines is a workspace where you can try different configurations of your pipelines and organize your runs into logical groups. You can use experiments to compare the performance of different models and track the evaluation metrics in the same dashboard2.

For the use case of designing a customized deep neural network in Keras that will predict customer purchases based on their purchase history, the best option is to create an experiment in Kubeflow Pipelines to organize multiple runs. This option allows you to explore model performance using multiple model architectures, store training data, and compare the evaluation metrics in the same dashboard. You can use Keras to build and train your deep neural network models, and then package them as pipeline components that can be reused and combined with other components. You can also use Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to define and submit your pipelines programmatically, and use Kubeflow Pipelines UI to monitor and manage your experiments. Therefore, creating an experiment in Kubeflow Pipelines to organize multiple runs is the best option for this use case.

References:

Kubeflow Pipelines documentation

Experiment | Kubeflow

Cloud Run can be triggered on new data arrivals, which makes it ideal for near-real-time processing. The function then initiates the Vertex AI Pipeline for preprocessing and storing features in Vertex AI Feature Store, aligning with the retraining needs. Cloud Scheduler (Option A) is suitable for scheduled jobs, not event-driven triggers. Dataflow (Option C) is better suited for batch processing or ETL rather than ML preprocessing pipelines.

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 TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV) is a library that helps you understand, validate, and monitor your data for machine learning. It can automatically detect and report schema anomalies, such as missing features, new features, or different data types, in your data. It can also generate descriptive statistics and data visualizations to help you explore and debug your data. TFDV can be integrated with your model training pipeline to ensure data quality and consistency throughout the machine learning lifecycle. References:

TensorFlow Data Validation

Data Validation | TensorFlow

Data Validation | Machine Learning Crash Course | Google Developers

 BigQuery is a service that allows you to store and query large amounts of data in a scalable and cost-effective way. You can use BigQuery to build a model that predicts customer lifetime value over the next three years, by using the create model statement. The create model statement is a SQL command that allows you to create and train an ML model using your data in BigQuery. You can use the create model statement to create an AutoML model, which is a type of model that automatically selects the best features and architecture for your data. By using an AutoML model, you can use the simplest approach to build the model, without writing any code or performing any feature engineering. You can also use the ml.evaluate and ml.predict statements to validate the results of your model. The ml.evaluate statement is a SQL command that allows you to evaluate the performance and quality of your model using various metrics. The ml.predict statement is a SQL command that allows you to make predictions using your model and new data. You can also use the BigQuery console to access visualization tools, such as charts and graphs, to explore and analyze your data and model results. By using the BigQuery console, the create model statement, and the ml.evaluate and ml.predict statements, you can build and validate a model that predicts customer lifetime value over the next three years, and have access to visualization tools. References:

BigQuery documentation

create model statement documentation

ml.evaluate statement documentation

ml.predict statement documentation

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate