Databricks-Machine-Learning-Associate Databricks Certified Machine Learning Associate Exam Questions and Answers

To organize MLflow runs with one parent run for the tuning process and a child run for each unique combination of hyperparameter values, the data scientist can specifynested=Truewhen starting the child run. This approach ensures that each child run is properly nested under the parent run, maintaining a clear hierarchical structure for the experiment. This nesting helps in tracking and comparing different hyperparameter combinations within the same tuning process.References:

• MLflow Documentation (Managing Nested Runs).

TheOneHotEncoderin Spark ML requires numerical indices as inputs rather than string labels. Therefore, you need to first convert the string columns to numerical indices usingStringIndexer. After that, you can applyOneHotEncoderto these indices.

Corrected code:

frompyspark.ml.featureimportStringIndexer, OneHotEncoder# Convert string column to indexindexers = [StringIndexer(inputCol=col, outputCol=col+"_index")forcolininput_columns] indexer_model = Pipeline(stages=indexers).fit(features_df) indexed_features_df = indexer_model.transform(features_df)# One-hot encode the indexed columnsohe = OneHotEncoder(inputCols=[col+"_index"forcolininput_columns], outputCols=output_columns) ohe_model = ohe.fit(indexed_features_df) ohe_features_df = ohe_model.transform(indexed_features_df)

References:

• PySpark ML Documentation

The Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning includes pre-installed packages and libraries essential for machine learning and deep learning, including MLflow. To use it, the machine learning engineer can simply select an appropriate Databricks Runtime ML version from the "Databricks Runtime Version" dropdown menu while creating their cluster. This selection ensures that all necessary machine learning libraries, including MLflow, are pre-installed and ready for use, avoiding the need to manually install them each time.

References

• Databricks documentation on creating clusters: https://docs.databricks.com/clusters/create.html

The Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is a standard and widely used metric for evaluating the accuracy of regression models. The statement that it is invalid is incorrect. Here’s a breakdown of why the other statements are or are not valid:

• Transformations and RMSE Calculation:If the model predictions were transformed (e.g., using log), they should be converted back to their original scale before calculating RMSE to ensure accuracy in the evaluation. Missteps in this conversion process can lead to misleading RMSE values.
• Accuracy of Models:Without additional information, we can't definitively say which model is more accurate without considering their RMSE values properly scaled back to the original price scale.
• Appropriateness of RMSE:RMSE is entirely valid for regression problems as it provides a measure of how accurately a model predicts the outcome, expressed in the same units as the dependent variable.

References

• "Applied Predictive Modeling" by Max Kuhn and Kjell Johnson (Springer, 2013), particularly the chapters discussing model evaluation metrics.

To use the pandas API on Spark, the data scientist can run the following code block:

importpyspark.pandasasps df = ps.DataFrame(spark_df)

This code imports the pandas API on Spark and converts the Spark DataFramespark_dfinto a pandas-on-Spark DataFrame, allowing the data scientist to use familiar pandas functions for further feature engineering.

References:

• Databricks documentation on pandas API on Spark: pandas API on Spark

The pandas API on Spark DataFrames are made up of Spark DataFrames with additional metadata. The pandas API on Spark aims to provide the pandas-like experience with the scalability and distributed nature of Spark. It allows users to work with pandas functions on large datasets by leveraging Spark’s underlying capabilities.

References:

• Databricks documentation on pandas API on Spark: pandas API on Spark

Tree of Parzen Estimators (TPE) is a sequential model-based optimization algorithm that selects hyperparameter values based on the outcomes of previous trials. It models the probability density of good and bad hyperparameter values and makes informed decisions about which hyperparameters to try next.

This approach contrasts with methods like random search and grid search, which do not use information from previous trials to guide the search process.

References:

• Hyperopt and TPE

To view the notebook that was run to create an MLflow run, you can click the "Source" link in the row corresponding to the run in the MLflow experiment page. The "Source" link provides a direct reference to the source notebook or script that initiated the run, allowing you to review the code and methodology used in the experiment. This feature is particularly useful for reproducibility and for understanding the context of the experiment.References:

• MLflow Documentation (Viewing Run Sources and Notebooks).

For large datasets with many variables, Spark ML distributes the training of a linear regression model using iterative optimization methods. Specifically, Spark ML employs algorithms such as Gradient Descent or L-BFGS (Limited-memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno) to iteratively minimize the loss function. These iterative methods are suitable for distributed computing environments and can handle large-scale data efficiently by partitioning the data across nodes in a cluster and performing parallel updates.References:

• Spark MLlib Documentation (Linear Regression with Iterative Optimization).

The F1 score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall and is particularly useful in situations where there is a significant imbalance between positive and negative classes. When there is a class imbalance, accuracy can be misleading because a model can achieve high accuracy by simply predicting the majority class. The F1 score, however, provides a better measure of the test's accuracy in terms of both false positives and false negatives.

Specifically, the F1 score should be used over accuracy when:

• There is a significant imbalance between positive and negative classes.
• Avoiding false negatives is a priority, meaning recall (the ability to detect all positive instances) is crucial.

In this scenario, the F1 score balances both precision (the ability to avoid false positives) and recall, providing a more meaningful measure of a model’s performance under these conditions.

References:

• Databricks documentation on classification metrics: Classification Metrics

Gradient boosting is fundamentally an iterative algorithm where each new tree is built based on the errors of the previous ones. This sequential dependency makes it difficult to parallelize the training of trees in gradient boosting, as each step relies on the results from the preceding step. Parallelization in this context would undermine the core methodology of the algorithm, which depends on sequentially improving the model'sperformance with each iteration.References:

• Machine Learning Algorithms (Challenges with Parallelizing Gradient Boosting).

Gradient boosting is an ensemble learning technique that builds models in a sequential manner. Each new model corrects the errors made by the previous ones. This sequential dependency means that each iteration requires the results of the previous iteration to make corrections. Here is a step-by-step explanation of why this makes parallelization challenging:

• Sequential Nature: Gradient boosting builds one tree at a time. Each tree is trained to correct the residual errors of the previous trees. This requires the model to complete one iteration before starting the next.
• Dependence on Previous Iterations: The gradient calculation at each step depends on the predictions made by the previous models. Therefore, the model must wait until the previous tree has been fully trained and evaluated before starting to train the next tree.
• Difficulty in Parallelization: Because of this dependency, it is challenging to parallelize the training process. Unlike algorithms that process data independently in each step (e.g., random forests), gradient boosting cannot easily distribute the work across multiple processors or cores for simultaneous execution.

This iterative and dependent nature of the gradient boosting process makes it difficult to parallelize effectively.

References

• Gradient Boosting Machine Learning Algorithm
• Understanding Gradient Boosting Machines

In the context of Spark MLlib, an estimator refers to an algorithm which can be "fit" on a DataFrame to produce a model (referred to as a Transformer), which can then be used to transform one DataFrame into another, typically adding predictions or model scores. This is a fundamental concept in machine learning pipelines in Spark, where the workflow includes fitting estimators to data to produce transformers.

References

• Spark MLlib Documentation:https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml-pipeline.html#estimators

The pandas API on Spark provides a way to scale pandas operations to big data while minimizing the need for refactoring existing pandas code. It allows users to run pandas operations on Spark DataFrames, leveraging Spark’s distributed computing capabilities to handle large datasets more efficiently. This approach requires minimal changes to the existing code, making it a convenient option for scaling pandas-based feature engineering notebooks.

References:

• Databricks documentation on pandas API on Spark: pandas API on Spark

The code block provided by the machine learning engineer will perform the desired inference when the Feature Store feature set was logged with the model at model_uri. This ensures that all necessary feature transformations and metadata are available for the model to make predictions. The Feature Store in Databricks allows for seamless integration of features and models, ensuring that the required features are correctly used during inference.

References:

• Databricks documentation on Feature Store: Feature Store in Databricks

To speed up the model tuning process when dealing with a large number of model configurations, parallelizing the hyperparameter search using Hyperopt is an effective approach. Hyperopt provides tools likeSparkTrialswhich can run hyperparameter optimization in parallel across a Spark cluster.

Example:

fromhyperoptimportfmin, tpe, hp, SparkTrials search_space = {'x': hp.uniform('x',0,1),'y': hp.uniform('y',0,1) }defobjective(params):returnparams['x'] **2+ params['y'] **2spark_trials = SparkTrials(parallelism=4) best = fmin(fn=objective, space=search_space, algo=tpe.suggest, max_evals=100, trials=spark_trials)

References:

• Hyperopt Documentation

To display visual histograms and summaries of the numeric features in a Spark DataFrame, the Databricks utility functiondbutils.data.summarizecan be used. This function provides a comprehensive summary, including visual histograms.

Correct code:

dbutils.data.summarize(spark_df)

Other options likespark_df.describe()andspark_df.summary()provide textual statistical summaries but do not include visual histograms.

References:

• Databricks Utilities Documentation

Including the entire pipeline as the estimator in the cross-validation process means that all stages of the pipeline, including data preprocessing steps like string indexing and vector assembling, will be refit or retransformed for each fold of the cross-validation. This results in a longer runtime because each fold requires re-execution of these preprocessing steps, which can be computationally expensive.

If only the random forest regressor (rfr) were included as the estimator, the preprocessing steps would be performed once, and only the model fitting would be repeated for each fold, significantly reducing the computational overhead.

References:

• Databricks documentation on cross-validation: Cross Validation

To improve the likelihood of a more accurate model, the data scientist can increasenum_evalsto 100. Increasing the number of evaluations allows the hyperparameter tuning process to explore a larger search space and evaluate more combinations of hyperparameters, which increases the chance of finding a more optimal set of hyperparameters for the model.

References:

• Databricks documentation on hyperparameter tuning: Hyperparameter Tuning

The best approach for the data scientist to take in this scenario is to create a new branch in Databricks, commit their changes, and push those changes to the Git provider. This approach allows the data scientist to make updates and improvements to the feature engineering part of the preprocessing pipeline without affecting the main codebase that runs daily. By creating a new branch, they can work on their changes in isolation. Once the changes are ready and tested, they can be merged back into the main branch through a pull request, ensuring a smooth integration process and allowing for code review and collaboration with other team members.

References:

• Databricks documentation on Git integration: Databricks Repos