Exactprep Professional-Machine-Learning-Engineer Questions

 The best option for monitoring the model to determine when retraining is necessary is to schedule a weekly query in BigQuery to compute the success metric. This option has the following advantages:

• It allows the model performance to be evaluated regularly, based on the actual outcome of the recommendations. By computing the success metric, which is the percentage of articles that are opened within two days and read for at least one minute, you can measure how well the model is achieving its objective and compare it with the acceptable baseline.
• It leverages the scalability and efficiency of BigQuery, which is a serverless, fully managed, and highly scalable data warehouse that can run complex queries over petabytes of data in seconds. By using BigQuery, you can access and analyze all the information needed to compute the success metric, such as the newsletter publication date, the article opening date, and the user reading time, without worrying about the infrastructure or the cost.
• It simplifies the model monitoring and retraining workflow, as the weekly query can be scheduled and executed automatically using BigQuery’s built-in scheduling feature. You can also set up alerts or notifications to inform you when the success metric falls below the acceptable baseline, and trigger the model retraining process accordingly.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

• Option A: Using Vertex AI Model Monitoring to detect skew of the input features with a sample rate of 100% and a monitoring frequency of two days introduces additional complexity and overhead. This option requires setting up and managing a Vertex AI Model Monitoring service, which is a managed service that provides various tools and features for machine learning, such as training, tuning, serving, and monitoring. However, using Vertex AI Model Monitoring to detect skew of the input features may not reflect the actual performance of the model, as skew is the discrepancy between the distributions of the features in the training dataset and the serving data, which may not affect the outcome of the recommendations. Moreover, using a sample rate of 100% and a monitoring frequency of two days may incur unnecessary cost and latency, as it requires analyzing all the input features every two days, which may not be needed for the model monitoring.
• Option B: Scheduling a cron job in Cloud Tasks to retrain the model every week before the newsletter is created introduces additional cost and risk. This option requires creating and running a cron job in Cloud Tasks, which is a fully managed service that allows you to schedule and execute tasks that are invoked by HTTP requests. However, using Cloud Tasks to retrain the model every week may not be optimal, as it may retrain the model more often than necessary, wasting compute resources and cost. Moreover, using Cloud Tasks to retrain the model before the newsletter is created may introduce risk, as it may deploy a new model version that has not been tested or validated, potentially affecting the quality of the recommendations.
• Option D: Scheduling a daily Dataflow job in Cloud Composer to compute the success metric introduces additional complexity and cost. This option requires creating and running a Dataflow job in Cloud Composer, which is a fully managed service that runs Apache Airflow pipelines for workflow orchestration. Dataflow is a fully managed service that runs Apache Beam pipelines for data processing and transformation. However, using Dataflow and Cloud Composer to compute the success metric may not be necessary, as it may add more steps and overhead to the model monitoring process. Moreover, using Dataflow and Cloud Composer to compute the success metric daily may not be optimal, as it may compute the success metric more often than needed, consuming more compute resources and cost.

References:

• [BigQuery documentation]
• [Vertex AI Model Monitoring documentation]
• [Cloud Tasks documentation]
• [Cloud Composer documentation]
• [Dataflow documentation]

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

AI Platform Training is a service that allows you to run your machine learning training jobs on Google Cloud using various features, model architectures, and hyperparameters. You can use AI Platform Training to scale up your training jobs, leverage distributed training, and access specialized hardware such as GPUs and TPUs1. AI Platform Training supports several pre-built containers that provide different ML frameworks and dependencies, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, and XGBoost2. However, if the ML framework and related dependencies that you need are not supported by the pre-built containers, you can build your own custom containers and use them to run your training jobs on AI Platform Training3.

Custom containers are Docker images that you create to run your training application. By using custom containers, you can specify and pre-install all the dependencies needed for your application, and have full control over the code, serving, and deployment of your model4. Custom containers also enable you to run distributed training jobs on AI Platform Training, which can help you train large-scale and complex models faster and more efficiently5. Distributed training is a technique that splits the training data and computation across multiple machines, and coordinates them to update the model parameters. AI Platform Training supports two types of distributed training: parameter server and collective all-reduce. The parameter server architecture consists of a set of workers that perform the computation, and a set of servers that store and update the model parameters. The collective all-reduce architecture consists of a set of workers that perform the computation and synchronize the model parameters among themselves. Both architectures also have a scheduler that coordinates the workers and servers.

For the use case of training a custom neural network that uses critical dependencies specific to your organization’s framework, the best option is to build your custom containers to run distributed training jobs on AI Platform Training. This option allows you to use the ML framework and dependencies of your choice, and train your model on multiple machines without having to manage the infrastructure. Since your ML framework of choice uses the scheduler, workers, and servers distribution structure, you can use the parameter server architecture to run your distributed training job on AI Platform Training. You can specify the number and type of machines, the custom container image, and the training application arguments when you submit your training job. Therefore, building your custom containers to run distributed training jobs on AI Platform Training is the best option for this use case.

References:

• AI Platform Training documentation
• Pre-built containers for training
• Custom containers for training
• Custom containers overview | Vertex AI | Google Cloud
• Distributed training overview
• [Types of distributed training]
• [Distributed training architectures]
• [Using custom containers for training with the parameter server architecture]

TFRecords are a binary file format that can store large amounts of data efficiently. By converting the images to TFRecords and storing them in a Cloud Storage bucket, you can reduce the data size and improve the data transfer speed. You can then read the TFRecords by using the tf.data.TFRecordDataset function, which creates a dataset of tensors from the TFRecord files. This way, you can read images at scale during training while minimizing data I/O bottlenecks. References:

• TFRecord documentation
• tf.data.TFRecordDataset documentation
• Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate