Professional-Machine-Learning-Engineer Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Questions and Answers

The option A is the most suitable solution for logging data and tracking artifacts from each run of a model development experiment in a Vertex AI Workbench notebook. Vertex AI Workbench is a service that allows you to create and run interactive notebooks on Google Cloud. You can use Vertex AI Workbench to experiment with different preprocessing and modeling approaches for your time series prediction problem. You can also use the Vertex AI TensorBoard instance and the Vertex AI SDK to create an experiment and associate the TensorBoard instance. TensorBoard is a tool that allows you to visualize and monitor the metrics and artifacts of your ML experiments. You can use the Vertex AI SDK to create an experiment object, which is a logical grouping of runs that share a common objective. You can also use the Vertex AI SDK to associate the experiment object with a TensorBoard instance, which is a managed service that hosts a TensorBoard web app. By using the Vertex AI TensorBoard instance and the Vertex AI SDK, you can easily set up and manage your experiments, and access the TensorBoard web app from the Vertex AI console. You can also use the log_time_series_metrics function and the log_metrics function to log data and track artifacts from each run. The log_time_series_metrics function is a function that allows you to log the time series data, such as the multivariate time series and the labels, to the TensorBoard instance. The log_metrics function is a function that allows you to log the scalar metrics, such as the loss values, to the TensorBoard instance. By using these functions, you can record the data and artifacts from each run of your experiment, and compare them in the TensorBoard web app. You can also use the TensorBoard web app to visualize the data and artifacts, such as the time series plots, the scalar charts, the histograms, and the distributions. By using the Vertex AI TensorBoard instance, the Vertex AI SDK, and the log functions, you can log data and track artifacts from each run of your experiment in a Vertex AI Workbench notebook.  References :

Vertex AI Workbench documentation

Vertex AI TensorBoard documentation

Vertex AI SDK documentation

log_time_series_metrics function documentation

log_metrics function documentation

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

 AutoML Vision is a Google Cloud service that allows you to train custom ML models for image classification, object detection, and segmentation without writing any code. You can use AutoML Vision to upload your training data, label it, and train a model using a graphical user interface. You can also evaluate the model’s performance and export it for deployment. One of the export options is Core ML, which is a framework that lets you integrate ML models into iOS applications. Core ML optimizes the model for on-device performance, power efficiency, and minimal memory footprint. By using AutoML Vision and Core ML, you can minimize code development and have a model that is optimized for inference on mobile phones.  References:

AutoML Vision documentation

Core ML documentation

The best option for handling missing values in a categorical feature is to replace them with a placeholder category indicating a missing value. This is a type of imputation, which is a method of estimating the missing values based on the observed data. Imputing the missing values with a placeholder category preserves the information that the data is missing, and avoids introducing bias or distortion in the feature distribution. It also allows the machine learning model to learn from the missingness pattern, and potentially use it as a predictor for the target variable. The other options are not suitable for handling missing values in a categorical feature, because:

Removing the rows with missing values and upsampling the dataset by 5% would reduce the size of the dataset and potentially lose important information. It would also introduce sampling bias and overfitting, as the upsampling process would create duplicate or synthetic observations that do not reflect the true population.

Replacing the missing values with the feature’s mean would not make sense for a categorical feature, as the mean is a numerical measure that does not capture the mode or frequency of the categories. It would also create a new category that does not exist in the original data, and might confuse the machine learning model.

Moving the rows with missing values to the validation dataset would compromise the validity and reliability of the model evaluation, as the validation dataset would not be representative of the test or production data. It would also reduce the amount of data available for training the model, and might introduce leakage or inconsistency between the training and validation datasets.  References :

Imputation of missing values

Effective Strategies to Handle Missing Values in Data Analysis

How to Handle Missing Values of Categorical Variables?

Google Cloud launches machine learning engineer certification

Google Professional Machine L earning Engineer Certification

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

 According to the official exam guide 1 , one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “explain the predictions of a trained model”.  TensorFlow 2  is an open source framework for developing and deploying machine learning and deep learning models.  TensorFlow supports various model explainability methods, such as Integrated Gradien ts 3 , which is a technique that assigns an importance score to each input feature by approximating the integral of the gradients along the path from a baseline input to the actual input. Integrated Gradients can help explain the output of a deep learning-based model by highlighting the most influential features in the input images. Therefore, option C is the best way to build the model for the given use case. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

TensorFlow

Integrated Gradients

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actua l Free Exam Questions

 The best option for investigating the tradeoffs between different parameter combinations is to create an experiment in Vertex AI Experiments, create a Vertex AI pipeline with a custom model training job as part of the pipeline, configure the pipeline’s parameters to include those you are investigating, and submit multiple runs to the same experiment using different values for the parameters. This option allows you to leverage the power and flexibility of Google Cloud to compare the pipeline performance of the different parameter combinations measured in F1 score, time to train, and model complexity. Vertex AI Experiments is a service that can track and compare the results of multiple machine learning runs. Vertex AI Experiments can record the metrics, parameters, and artifacts of each run, and display them in a dashboard for easy visualization and analysis.  Vertex AI Experiments can also help users opti mize the hyperparameters of their models by using different search algorithms, such as grid search, random search, or Bayesian optimization 1 . 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. A custom model training job is a type of pipeline step that can train a custom model by using a user-provided script or container. A custom model training job can accept pipeline parameters as inputs, which can be used to control the training logic or data source. By creating an experiment in Vertex AI Experiments, creating a Vertex AI pipeline with a custom model training job as part of the pipeline, configuring the pipeline’s parameters to include those you are investigating, and submitting multiple runs to the same experiment using different values for the parameters, you can create a reproducible and trackable approach to investigate the tradeoffs between different parameter combinations.

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

Option A: Using BigQuery ML to create a boosted tree regressor and use the hyperparameter tuning capability, configuring the hyperparameter syntax to select different input datasets, max tree depths, and optimizer learning rates, and choosing the grid search option would not be able to handle different input datasets as a hyperparameter, and would not be as flexible and scalable as using Vertex AI Experiments and Vertex AI Pipelines. BigQuery ML is a service that can create and train machine learning models by using SQL queries on BigQuery. BigQuery ML can perform hyperparameter tuning by using the ML.FORECAST or ML.PREDICT functions, and specifying the hyperparameters option. BigQuery ML can also use different search algorithms, such as grid search, random search, or Bayesian optimization, to find the optimal hyperparameters. However, BigQuery ML can only tune the hyperparameters that are related to the model architecture or training process, such as max tree depth or learning rate. BigQuery ML cannot tune the hyperparameters that are related to the data source, such as input dataset.  Moreover, BigQuery ML is not designed to work w ith Vertex AI Experiments or Vertex AI Pipelines, which can provide more features and flexibility for tracking and orchestrating machine learning workflows 2 .

Option B: Creating a Vertex AI pipeline with a custom model training job as part of the pipeline, configuring the pipeline’s parameters to include those you are investigating, and using the Bayesian optimization method with F1 score as the target to maximize in the custom training step would not be able to track and compare the results of multiple runs, and would require more skills and steps than using Vertex AI Experiments and Vertex AI Pipelines. 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. A custom model training job is a type of pipeline step that can train a custom model by using a user-provided script or container. A custom model training job can accept pipeline parameters as inputs, which can be used to control the training logic or data source. However, using the Bayesian optimization method with F1 score as the target to maximize in the custom training step would require writing code, implementing the optimization algorithm, and defining the objective function.  Moreover, this option would not be able to track and compare the results of multiple runs, as Vertex AI Pipelines does not have a built-in feature for recording and displaying the metrics, parameters, and a rtifacts of each run 3 .

Option C: Creating a Vertex AI Workbench notebook for each of the different input datasets, running different local training jobs with different combinations of the max tree depth and optimizer learning rate parameters, and appending the results to a BigQuery table would not be able to track and compare the results of multiple runs on the same platform, and would require more skills and steps than using Vertex AI Experiments and Vertex AI Pipelines. 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. However, creating a Vertex AI Workbench notebook for each of the different input datasets, running different local training jobs with different combinations of the max tree depth and optimizer learning rate parameters, and appending the results to a BigQuery table would require creating multiple notebooks, writing code, setting up local environments, connecting to BigQuery, loading and preprocessing the data, training and evaluating the model, and writing the results to a BigQuery table.  Moreover, this option would not be able to track and compare the results of multiple runs on the same platform, as BigQuery is a separate service from Vertex AI Workbe nch, and does not have a dashboard for visualizing and analyzing the metrics, parameters, and artifacts of each run 4 .

 Image classification is a task where the model assigns a label to an image based on its content, such as “stop sign” or " speed limit " 1 .  Object detection is a task where the model locates and identifies multiple objects in an image, and draws bounding boxes around them 2 . Since your dataset consists of images that were cropped to show one out of ten different traffic signs, you are dealing with an image classification problem, not an object detection problem. Therefore, you need to train a model for image classification, not object detection.

Vertex AI AutoML is a service that allows you to train and deploy high-qual ity ML models with minimal effort and machine learning expertise 3 .  You can use Vertex AI AutoML to train a model for image classification by uploading your images and labels to a Vertex AI dataset, and then launching an Au toML training job 4 .  However, Vertex AI AutoML does not allow you to tune the model during each training run, as it automatically selects the best m odel architecture and hyperparameters for your data 4 .

Vertex AI custom tr aining is a service that allows you to train and deploy your own custom ML models using your own code and frameworks 5 . You can use Vertex AI custom training to train a model for image classification by writing your own model training code, such as using TensorFlow or PyTorch, and then creating and running a custom training job. Vertex AI custom training allows you to tune the model during each training run, as you can specify the model architecture and hyperparameters in your code, and use Vertex AI Hyperparameter Tuning to optimize them .

Therefore, the best option for your scenario is to develop the model training code for image classification and train a model by using Vertex AI custom training.

TFX ModelValidator  is a tool that allows y ou to compare new models against a baseline model and evaluate their performance on different metrics and data slices 1 . 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 reported 2 . 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 best option for building a recommendation system without any user event data is to use simple heuristics based on content metadata. This is a type of content-based filtering, which recommends items that are similar to the ones that the user has interacted with or selected, based on their attributes. For example, if a user selects a comedy movie from the US released in 2020, the system can recommend other comedy movies from the US released in 2020 or nearby years. This approach does not require any machine learning, but it can leverage the existing metadata of the videos to provide relevant recommendations. It also allows the system to start collecting user event data, such as views, likes, ratings, etc., which can be used to train a more sophisticated machine learning model in the future, such as a collaborative filtering model or a hybrid model that combines content and collaborative information.  References :

Recommendation Systems

Content-Based Filtering

Collaborative Filtering

Hybrid Recommender Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

 Overfitting occurs when a model tries to fit the training data so closely that it does not generalize well to new data. Overfitting can be caused by having a model that is too complex for the data, such as having too many parameters or layers.  Overfitting can lead to poor performance on the validation data, which reflects how the model will perform on unseen data 1

To prevent overfitting, one strategy is to use regularization techniques that penalize the complexity of the model and encourage it to learn simpler patterns. Two common regularization techniques for deep neural networks are L2 regularization and dropout. L2 regularization adds a term to the loss function that is proportional to the squared magnitude of the model’s weights. This term penalizes large weights and encourages the model to use smaller weights. Dropout randomly drops out some units in the network during training, which prevents co-adaptation of features and reduces the effec tive number of parameters.  Both L2 regularization and dropout have hyperparameters that control the strength of the regularization effect 2 3

Another strategy to prevent overfitting is to use hyperparameter tuning, which is the process of finding the optimal values for the parameters of the model that affect its performance. Hyperparameter tuning can help find the best combination of hyperparameters that minimize the validation loss and improve the generalization ability of the model. AI Platform provides a service for hyperparameter tuning that can run multiple trials in parallel and use different search algorithms to find the best solution.

Therefore, the best strategy to use when retraining the model is to run a hyperparameter tuning job on AI Platform to optimize for the L2 regularization and dropout parameters. This will allow the model to find the optimal balance between fitting the training data and generalizing to new data. The other options are not as effective, as they either use fixed values for the regularization parameters, which may not be optimal, or they do not address the issue of overfitting at all.

Cloud Vision API is a service that allows you to analyze images using pre-trained machine learning models 1 .  You can use Cloud Vision API to perform various tasks, such as face detection, text extraction, logo recognition, and object localization 1 .  Object localization is a feature that allows you to detect multiple objects in an image and draw bounding boxes around them 2 .  You can also get the labels and confidence scores for each detected object 2 .

By sending user-submitted images to the Cloud Vision API, you can use object localization to identify all objects in the image and compare the results against a list of animals.  You can use the  OBJECT_LOCALIZATION  feature type in the  A nnotateImageRequest  to request object localization 3 . You can then use the  localizedObjectAnnotations  field in the  AnnotateImageResponse  to get the list of detected objects, their labels, and their confidence scores. You can compare the labels with a predefined list of animals, such as dogs, cats, birds, etc., and determine whether the image has an animal or not.

This option is the best for your scenario, because it allows you to automatically and in near real time detect whether each uploaded photo has an animal, without requiring any manual labeling, model training, or model deployment. You can also prioritize time and minimize cost of your application development and deployment, as you can use the Cloud Vision API as a ready-to-use service, without needing any machine learning expertise or infrastructure.

The other options are not suitable for your scenario, because they either require manual labeling, model training, or model deployment, which would increase the time and cost of your application development and deployment, or they use object detection models, which are more complex and computationally expensive than object localization models, and are not necessary for your simple task of detecting whether an image has an animal or not.

 Cloud Storage is a scalable and cost-effective storage service for any type of data. By storing image files in Cloud Storage, you can access them from anywhere and avoid the overhead of managing your own storage infrastructure. However, accessing image files directly from Cloud Storage can be slow and inefficient, especially for large-scale training. A better option is to use serialized records, such as TFRecord or Apache Avro, which are binary formats that store multiple images and their labels in a single file. Serialized records can improve the data throughput and reduce the network latency, as well as enable data compression and sharding. You can use TensorFlow or Apache Beam APIs to create and read serialized records from Cloud Storage. This solution requires minimal code changes and can speed up your training time significantly.  References :

Cloud Storage | Google Cloud

TFRecord and tf.Example | TensorFlow Core

Apache Avro 1.10.2 Specification

Using Apache Beam with Cloud Storage | Cloud Storage

 The best option for continuing experimenting and iterating on your pipeline to improve model performance, using Cloud Build for CI/CD, and deploying new pipelines into production quickly and easily, is to set up a CI/CD pipeline that builds and tests your source code and then deploys built artifacts into a pre-production environment. After a successful pipeline run in the pre-production environment, deploy the pipeline to production. This option allows you to leverage the power and simplicity of Cloud Build to automate, monitor, and manage your pipeline development and deployment workflow. Cloud Build is a service that can create and run continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines on Google Cloud. Cloud Build can build your source code, run unit tests, and deploy built artifacts to various Google Cloud services, such as Vertex AI Pipelines, Vertex AI Endpoints, and Artifact Registry. A CI/CD pipeline is a workflow that can automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software. A CI/CD pipeline can help you improve the quality and reliability of your software, accelerate the development and delivery cycle, and reduce the manual effort and errors. A pre-production environment is an environment that can simulate the production environment, but is isolated from the real users and data. A pre-production environment can help you test and validate your software before deploying it to production, and catch any bugs or issues that may affect the user experience or the system performance. By setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds and tests your source code and then deploys built artifacts into a pre-production environment, you can ensure that your pipeline code is consistent and error-free, and that your pipeline artifacts are compatible and functional. After a successful pipeline run in the pre-production environment, you can deploy the pipeline to production, which is the environment where your software is accessible and usable by the real users and data.  By deploying the pipeline to production after a successful pipeline run in the pre-production environment, you can minimize the chance that the new pipeline implementations will break in production, and ensure that your software meets the user expectations and requirements 1 .

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

Option A: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds and tests your source code, and if the tests are successful, using the Google Cloud console to upload the built container to Artifact Registry and upload the compiled pipeline to Vertex AI Pipelines would not allow you to deploy new pipelines into production quickly and easily, and could increase the manual effort and errors. The Google Cloud console is a web-based user interface that can help you access and manage various Google Cloud services, such as Artifact Registry and Vertex AI Pipelines. Artifact Registry is a service that can store and manage your container images and other artifacts on Google Cloud. Artifact Registry can help you upload and organize your container images, and track the image versions and metadata. 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. However, setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds and tests your source code, and if the tests are successful, using the Google Cloud console to upload the built container to Artifact Registry and upload the compiled pipeline to Vertex AI Pipelines would not allow you to deploy new pipelines into production quickly and easily, and could increase the manual effort and errors. You would need to write code, create and run the CI/CD pipeline, use the Google Cloud console to upload the built container to Artifact Registry, and use the Google Cloud console to upload the compiled pipeline to Vertex AI Pipelines.  Moreover, this option would not use a pre-production environment to test and validate your pipeline before deploying it to production, which could increase the chance that the new pipeline implemen tations will break in production 1 .

Option B: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds your source code and then deploys built artifacts into a pre-production environment, running unit tests in the pre-production environment, and if the tests are successful, deploying the pipeline to production would not allow you to test and validate your pipeline before deploying it to production, and could cause errors or poor performance. A unit test is a type of test that can verify the functionality and correctness of a small and isolated unit of code, such as a function or a class. A unit test can help you debug and improve your code quality, and catch any bugs or issues that may affect the code logic or output. However, setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds your source code and then deploys built artifacts into a pre-production environment, running unit tests in the pre-production environment, and if the tests are successful, deploying the pipeline to production would not allow you to test and validate your pipeline before deploying it to production, and could cause errors or poor performance. You would need to write code, create and run the CI/CD pipeline, deploy the built artifacts to the pre-production environment, run the unit tests in the pre-production environment, and deploy the pipeline to production.  Moreover, this option would not run the pipeline in the pre-production environme nt, which could prevent you from testing and validating the pipeline functionality and compatibility, and catching any bugs or issues that may affect the pipeline workflow or output 1 .

Option D: Setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds and tests your source code and then deploys built artifacts into a pre-production environment, after a successful pipeline run in the pre-production environment, rebuilding the source code, and deploying the artifacts to production would not allow you to deploy new pipelines into production quickly and easily, and could increase the complexity and cost of the pipeline development and deployment. Rebuilding the source code is a process that can recompile and repackage the source code into executable artifacts, such as container images and pipeline files. Rebuilding the source code can help you incorporate any changes or updates that may have occurred in the source code, and ensure that the artifacts are consistent and up-to-date. However, setting up a CI/CD pipeline that builds and tests your source code and then deploys built artifacts into a pre-production environment, after a successful pipeline run in the pre-production environment, rebuilding the source code, and deploying the artifacts to production would not allow you to deploy new pipelines into production quickly and easily, and could increase the complexity and cost of the pipeline development and deployment. You would need to write code, create and run the CI/CD pipeline, deploy the built artifacts to the pre-production environment, run the pipeline in the pre-production environment, rebuild the source code, and deploy the artifacts to production.  Moreover, this option would increase the pipeline development and deployment time, as rebuilding the source code can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process 1 .

Option A is incorrect because using AI Platform to run distributed training jobs with checkpoints does not reduce the compute costs, but rather increases them by using more resources and storing the checkpoints.

Option B is incorrect because using AI Platform to run distributed training jobs without checkpoints may reduce the compute costs, but it also risks losing the progress of the training if the job fails or is interrupted.

Option C is correct because migrating to training with Kubeflow on Google Kubernetes Engine, and using preemptible VMs with checkpoints can reduce the compute costs significantly by using cheaper and more scalable resources, while also preserving the state of the training with checkpoints.

Option D is incorrect because using preemptible VMs without checkpoints may reduce the compute costs, but it also risks losing the training progress if the VMs are preempted.

Option A is incorrect because Cloud SQL is a relational database service that is not designed for storing and comparing model performance statistics. It would require writing complex SQL queries to perform the comparison, and it would not provide any visualization or analysis tools.

Option B is incorrect because Vertex AI does not support creating versions of models for each season per year. Vertex AI models are versioned based on the training data and hyperparameters, not on external factors such as seasonality or holidays. Moreover, the Evaluate tab of the Vertex AI UI only shows the performance metrics of a single model version, not across multiple versions.

Option C is incorrect because Kubeflow is a different platform than Vertex AI, and it does not integrate well with Vertex AI Pipelines. Kubeflow experiments are used to group pipeline runs that share a common goal or objective, not to compare performance statistics across different seasons or years. Kubeflow UI does not provide any tools to compare the results across the experiments, and it would require switching between different platforms to access the data.

Option D is correct because Vertex ML Metadata is a service that allows storing and tracking metadata associated with machine learning workflows, such as models, datasets, metrics, and events. Events are user-defined labels that can be used to group or slice the metadata for analysis. By using seasons and years as events, you can easily store and compare the performance statistics of each version of your models across different time periods. Vertex ML Metadata also provides tools to visualize and analyze the metadata, such as the ML Metadata Explorer and the What-If Tool.

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.

The best option to stabilize the pipeline without downgrading the evaluation quality while minimizing infrastructure overhead is to use Dataflow as the runner for the evaluation step. Dataflow is a fully managed service for executing Apache Beam pipelines that can scale up and down according to the workload. Dataflow can handle large-scale, distributed data processing tasks such as model evaluation, and it can also integrate with Vertex AI Pipelines and TensorFlow Extended (TFX). By using the flag  -runner=DataflowRunner  in  beam_pipeline_args , you can instruct the Evaluator component to run the evaluation step on Dataflow, instead of using the default DirectRunner, which runs locally and may cause out-of-memory errors. Option A is incorrect because adding  tfma.MetricsSpec()  to limit the number of metrics in the evaluation step may downgrade the evaluation quality, as some important metrics may be omitted. Moreover, reducing the number of metrics may not solve the out-of-memory error, as the evaluation step may still consume a lot of memory depending on the size and complexity of the data and the model. Option B is incorrect because migrating the pipeline to Kubeflow hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) may increase the infrastructure overhead, as you need to provision, manage, and monitor the GKE cluster yourself. Moreover, you need to specify the appropriate node parameters for the evaluation step, which may require trial and error to find the optimal configuration. Option D is incorrect because moving the evaluation step out of the pipeline and running it on custom Compute Engine VMs may also increase the infrastructure overhead, as you need to create, configure, and delete the VMs yourself. Moreover, you need to ensure that the VMs have sufficient memory for the evaluation step, which may require trial and error to find the optimal machine type. References:

Dataflow documentation

Using DataflowRunner

Evaluator component documentation

Configuring the Evaluator component

Precision and recall are two common metrics for evaluating the performance of a classification model. Precision measures the proportion of positive predictions that are correct, while recall measures the proportion of positive examples that are correctly predicted. Precision and recall are inversely related, meaning that increasing one will decrease the other, and vice versa.  The trade-off between precision and recall depends on the goal and the cost of the classification problem 1 .

For the use case of detecting whether posted images contain cars, precision is more important than recall, as the social media company wants to minimize the number of false positives, or images that are incorrectly labeled as containing cars. A high precision means that the model is confident and accurate in its positive predictions, while a low recall means that the model may miss some positive ex amples, or images that actually contain cars. The cost of missing some positive examples is lower than the cost of making wrong positive predictions, as the latter may affect the user experience and the reputation of the social media company.

The softmax function is a function that transforms a vector of real numbers into a probability distribution over the possible classes. The softmax function is often used as the final layer of a neural network for multi-class classification problems, as it assigns a probability to each class, and the class with the highest probability is chosen as the prediction. The softmax function is defined as:

softmax (x_i) = exp (x_i) / sum_j exp (x_j)

where x_i is the input value for class i, and softmax (x_i) is the output probability for class i.

The softmax threshold is a parameter that determines the minimum probability that a class must have to be chosen as the prediction. For example, if the softmax threshold is 0.5, then the class with the highest probability must have at least 0.5 to be selected, otherwise the prediction is none.  The softmax threshold can be used to adjust the trade-off between precision and recall, as a higher threshold will in crease the precision and decrease the recall, while a lower threshold will decrease the precision and increase the recall 2 .

For the use case of detecting whether posted images contain cars, the best way to adjust the model’s final layer softmax threshold to increase precision is to decrease the recall. This means that the softmax threshold should be increased, so that the model will only make positive predictions when it is highly confident, and avoid making false positives. By increasing the softmax threshold, the model will become more selective and accurate in its positive predictions, and improve the precision metric. Therefore, decreasing the recall is the best option for this use case.

Developing ML models with AI Platform for image segmentation on CT scans requires a lot of computation and experimentation, as image segmentation is a complex and challenging task that involves assigning a label to each pixel in an image.  Image segmentation can be used for various medical applications, such as tumor detection, organ segmentation, or lesion localization 1

To minimize the computation costs and manual intervention while having version control for the code, one should use Cloud Build linked with Cloud Source Repositories to trigger retraining when new code is pushed to the repository. Cloud Build is a service that executes your builds on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.  Cloud Build can import source code from Cloud Source Repositories, Cloud Storage, GitHub, or Bitbucket, execute a build to your specifications, and produce artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives 2

Cloud Build allows you to set up automated triggers that start a build when changes are pushed to a source code repository.  You can configure triggers to filter the changes based on the branch, tag, or file path 3

Cloud Source Repositories is a service that provides fully managed private Git repositories on Google Cloud Platform. Cloud Source Repositories allows you to store, manage, and track your code using the Git version control system.  You can also use Cloud Source Repositories to connect to other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Build, Cloud Functions, or Cloud Run 4

To use Cloud Build linked with Cloud Source Repositories to trigger retraining when new code is pushed to the repository, you need to do the following steps:

Create a Cloud Source Repository for your code, and push your code to the repository.  You can use the Cloud SDK, Cloud Console, or Cloud Source Repositories API to create and manage your repository 5

Create a Cloud Build trigger for your repository, and specify the build configuration and the trigger settings. You can use the Cloud SDK, Cloud Console, or Cloud Build API to create and manage your trigger.

Specify the steps of the build in a YAML or JSON file, such as installing the dependencies, running the tests, building the container image, and submitting the training job to AI Platform. You can also use the Cloud Build predefined or custom build steps to simplify your build configuration.

Push your new code to the repository, and the trigger will start the build automatically. You can monitor the status and logs of the build using the Cloud SDK, Cloud Console, or Cloud Build API.

The other options are not as easy or feasible. Using Cloud Functions to identify changes to your code in Cloud Storage and trigger a retraining job is not ideal, as Cloud Functions has limitations on the memory, CPU, and execution time, and does not provide a user interface for managing and tracking your builds. Using the gcloud command-line tool to submit training jobs on AI Platform when you update your code is not optimal, as it requires manual intervention and does not leverage the benefits of Cloud Build and its integration with Cloud Source Repositories. Creating an automated workflow in Cloud Composer that runs daily and looks for changes in code in Cloud Storage using a sensor is not relevant, as Cloud Composer is mainly designed for orchestrating complex workflows across multiple systems, and does not provide a version control system for your code.

BigQuery ML is a service that allows you to create and train ML models using SQL queries. You can use BigQuery ML to train an AutoML regression model, which is a type of model that automatically selects the best features and architecture for your data. You can also specify Vertex AI as the model registry, which is a service that allows you to store and manage your ML models. By using Vertex AI as the model registry, you can easily deploy your model to a Vertex AI endpoint, which is a service that allows you to serve your ML models online and scale them automatically. By using BigQuery ML, Vertex AI model registry, and Vertex AI endpoint, you can deploy your model for online prediction as quickly as possible, without having to export, import, or retrain your model.  References :

BigQuery ML documentation

Vertex AI documentation

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The best option for automating the retraining of your model by using minimal additional code when model feature values change, and minimizing the number of times that your model is retrained to reduce training costs, is to create a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor prediction drift, configure alert monitoring to publish a message to a Pub/Sub queue when a monitoring alert is detected, and use a Cloud Function to monitor the Pub/Sub queue, and trigger retraining in BigQuery. This option allows you to leverage the power and simplicity of Vertex AI, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Functions to monitor your model performance and retrain your model when needed. Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and deploying machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. Vertex AI can deploy a trained model to an online prediction endpoint, which can provide low-latency predictions for individual instances. Vertex AI can also provide various tools and services for data analysis, model development, model deployment, model monitoring, and model governance. A Vertex AI Model Monitoring job is a resource that can monitor the performance and quality of your deployed models on Vertex AI. A Vertex AI Model Monitoring job can help you detect and diagnose issues with your models, such as data drift, prediction drift, training/serving skew, or model staleness. Prediction drift is a type of model monitoring metric that measures the difference between the distributions of the predictions generated by the model on the training data and the predictions generated by the model on the online data. Prediction drift can indicate that the model performance is degrading, or that the online data is changing over time. By creating a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor prediction drift, you can track the changes in the model predictions, and compare them with the expected predictions. Alert monitoring is a feature of Vertex AI Model Monitoring that can notify you when a monitoring metric exceeds a predefined threshold. Alert monitoring can help you set up rules and conditions for triggering alerts, and choose the notification channel for receiving alerts. Pub/Sub is a service that can provide reliable and scalable messaging and event streaming on Google Cloud. Pub/Sub can help you publish and subscribe to messages, and deliver them to various Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Functions. A Pub/Sub queue is a resource that can hold messages that are published to a Pub/Sub topic. A Pub/Sub queue can help you store and manage messages, and ensure that they are delivered to the subscribers. By configuring alert monitoring to publish a message to a Pub/Sub queue when a monitoring alert is detected, you can send a notification to a Pub/Sub topic, and trigger a downstream action based on the alert. Cloud Functions is a service that can run your stateless code in response to events on Google Cloud. Cloud Functions can help you create and execute functions without provisioning or managing servers, and pay only for the resources you use. A Cloud Function is a resource that can execute a piece of code in response to an event, such as a Pub/Sub message. A Cloud Function can help you perform various tasks, such as data processing, data transformation, or data analysis. BigQuery is a service that can store and query large-scale data on Google Cloud. BigQuery can help you analyze your data by using SQL queries, and perform various tasks, such as data exploration, data transformation, or data visualization. BigQuery ML is a feature of BigQuery that can create and execute machine learning models in BigQuery by using SQL queries. BigQuery ML can help you build and train various types of models, such as linear regression, logistic regression, k-means clustering, matrix factorization, and deep neural networks. By using a Cloud Function to monitor the Pub/Sub queue, and trigger retraining in BigQuery, you can automate the retraining of your model by using minimal additional code when model feature values change. You can write a Cloud Function that listens to the Pub/Sub queue, and executes a SQL query to retrain your model in BigQuery ML when a prediction drift alert is received.  By retraining your model in BigQuery ML, you can update your model parameters and improve your model performance and accuracy 1 .

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

Option A: Enabling request-response logging on Vertex AI Endpoints, scheduling a TensorFlow Data Validation job to monitor prediction drift, and executing model retraining if there is significant distance between the distributions would require more skills and steps than creating a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor prediction drift, configuring alert monitoring to publish a message to a Pub/Sub queue when a monitoring alert is detected, and using a Cloud Function to monitor the Pub/Sub queue, and trigger retraining in BigQuery. Request-response logging is a feature of Vertex AI Endpoints that can record the requests and responses that are sent to and from the online prediction endpoint. Request-response logging can help you collect and analyze the online prediction data, and troubleshoot any issues with your model. TensorFlow Data Validation is a tool that can analyze and validate your data for machine learning. TensorFlow Data Validation can help you explore, understand, and clean your data, and detect various data issues, such as data drift, data skew, or data anomalies. Prediction drift is a type of data issue that measures the difference between the distributions of the predictions generated by the model on the training data and the predictions generated by the model on the online data. Prediction drift can indicate that the model performance is degrading, or that the online data is changing over time. By enabling request-response logging on Vertex AI Endpoints, and scheduling a TensorFlow Data Validation job to monitor prediction drift, you can collect and analyze the online prediction data, and compare the distributions of the predictions. However, enabling request-response logging on Vertex AI Endpoints, scheduling a TensorFlow Data Validation job to monitor prediction drift, and executing model retraining if there is significant distance between the distributions would require more skills and steps than creating a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor prediction drift, configuring alert monitoring to publish a message to a Pub/Sub queue when a monitoring alert is detected, and using a Cloud Function to monitor the Pub/Sub queue, and trigger retraining in BigQuery. You would need to write code, enable and configure the request-response logging, create and run the TensorFlow Data Validation job, define and measure the distance between the distributions, and execute the model retraining.  Moreover, this option would not automate the retraining of your model, as you would need to manually check the prediction drift and trigger the retraining 2 .

Option B: Enabling request-response logging on Vertex AI Endpoints, scheduling a TensorFlow Data Validation job to monitor training/serving skew, and executing model retraining if there is significant distance between the distributions would not help you monitor the changes in the model feature values, and could cause errors or poor performance. Training/serving skew is a type of data issue that measures the difference between the distributions of the features used to train the model and the features used to serve the model. Training/serving skew can indicate that the model is not trained on the representative data, or that the data is changing over time. By enabling request-response logging on Vertex AI Endpoints, and scheduling a TensorFlow Data Validation job to monitor training/serving skew, you can collect and analyze the online prediction data, and compare the distributions of the features. However, enabling request-response logging on Vertex AI Endpoints, scheduling a TensorFlow Data Validation job to monitor training/serving skew, and executing model retraining if there is significant distance between the distributions would not help you monitor the changes in the model feature values, and could cause errors or poor performance. You would need to write code, enable and configure the request-response logging, create and run the TensorFlow Data Validation job, define and measure the distance between the distributions, and execute the model retraining.  Moreover, this option would not monitor the prediction drift, which is a more direct and relevant metric for measuring the model performance and quality 2 .

Option D: Creating a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor training/serving skew, configuring alert monitoring to publish a message to a Pub/Sub queue when a monitoring alert is detected, and using a Cloud Function to monitor the Pub/Sub queue, and trigger retraining in BigQuery would not help you monitor the changes in the model feature values, and could cause errors or poor performance. Training/serving skew is a type of data issue that measures the difference between the distributions of the features used to train the model and the features used to serve the model. Training/serving skew can indicate that the model is not trained on the representative data, or that the data is changing over time. By creating a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor training/serving skew, you can track the changes in the model features, and compare them with the expected features. However, creating a Vertex AI Model Monitoring job configured to monitor training/serving skew, configuring alert monitoring to publish a message to a Pub/Sub queue when a monitoring alert is detected, and using a Cloud Function to monitor the Pub/Sub queue, and trigger retraining in BigQuery would not help you monitor the changes in the model feature values, and could cause errors or poor performance. You would need to write code, create and configure the Vertex AI Model Monitoring job, configure the alert monitoring, create and configure the Pub/Sub queue, and write a Cloud Function to trigger the retraining.  Moreover, this option would not monitor the prediction drift, which is a more direct and relevant metric for measuring t he model performance and quality 1 .

 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

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According to the official exam guide 1 , 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 outcome 2 . 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 attributions 3 . The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Feature attributions for c lassification and regression

AutoML for Tabular Data

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Q uestions

The most likely problem is that the tables that you created to hold your training and validation records share some records, and you may not be using all the data in your initial table. This is because the RAND() function generates a random number between 0 and 1 for each row, and the probability of a row being in both the training and validation tables is 0.2 * 0.8 = 0.16, which is not negligible. This means that some of the records that you use to validate your model are also used to train your model, which can lead to overfitting and poor generalization. Moreover, the probability of a row being in neither the training nor the validation table is 0.2 * 0.2 = 0.04, which means that you are wasting some of the data in your initial table and reducing the size of your datasets. A better way to split your data into training and validation sets is to use a hash function on a unique identifier column, such as the following queries:

CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE ‘myproject.mydataset.training‘ AS (SELECT * FROM ‘myproject.mydataset.mytable‘ WHERE MOD(FARM_FINGERPRINT(id), 10) < 8); CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE ‘myproject.mydataset.validation‘ AS (SELECT * FROM ‘myproject.mydataset.mytable‘ WHERE MOD(FARM_FINGERPRINT(id), 10) > = 8);

This way, you can ensure that each row has a fixed 80% chance of being in the training table and a 20% chance of being in the validation table, without any overlap or omission.

Option A is incorrect because using AI Platform notebooks to perform a Lasso regression analysis on your model, which will eliminate features that do not provide a strong signal, is not a suitable way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model.  Lasso regression is a method of feature selection that applies a penalty to the coefficients of the linear model, and shrinks them to zero for irrelevant features 1 . However, this method assumes that the model is linear and additive, which may not be the case for a TensorFlow model. Moreover, this method does not provide feature attributions for each prediction, but rather for the entire dataset.

Option B is incorrect because streaming prediction results to BigQuery, and using BigQuery’s CORR(X1, X2) function to calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient between each feature and the target variable, is not a valid way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model.  The Pearson corr elation coefficient is a measure of the linear relationship between two variables, ranging from -1 to 1 2 . However, this method does not account for the interactions between features or the non-linearity of the model. Moreover, this method does not provide feature attributions for each prediction, but rather for the entire dataset.

Option C is correct because using the AI Explanations feature on AI Platform, and submitting each prediction request with the ‘explain’ keyword to retrieve feature attributions using the sampled Shapley method, is the best way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model.  AI Explanations is a service that allows you to get feature attributions for your deployed models on AI Platform 3 .  Feature attributions are values that indicate how much each feature contributed to the prediction for a given instance 4 .  The sampled Shapley method is a technique that uses the Shapley value, a game-theoretic concept, to measure the contribution of each feature to the prediction 5 . By using AI Explanations, you can get feature attributions for each prediction request, and identify the most important features for each customer.

Option D is incorrect because using the What-If tool in Google Cloud to determine how your model will perform when individual features are excluded, and ranking the feature importance in order of those that caused the most significant performance drop when removed from the model, is not a practical way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model. The What-If tool is a tool that allows you to visualize and analyze your ML models and datasets. However, this method requires manually editing or removing features for each instance, and observing the change in the prediction. This method is not scalable or efficient, and may not capture the interactions between features or the non-linearity of the model.

When you deploy a custom container to Vertex AI Model Registry, you need to follow some requirements for the container configuration. One of these requirements is to use the HTTP port 8080 for serving predictions. If you use a different port, the model server might not be able to communicate with Vertex AI and cause the error “Error model server never became ready”. To fix this error, you need to change the HTTP port in your model’s configuration to the default value of 8080 and redeploy the container.  References :

Custom container requirements documentation

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Ce rtificate

Monitoring model performance is an essential part of production readiness, as it allows the team to detect and address any issues that may arise after deployment, such as data drift, model degradation, or errors.

Other Options :

A. Ensuring that training is reproducible is important for model development, but not necessarily for production readiness. Reproducibility helps the team to track and compare different experiments, but it does not guarantee that the model will perform well in production.

B. Ensuring that all hyperparameters are tuned is also important for model development, but not sufficient for production readiness. Hyperparameter tuning helps the team to find the optimal configuration for the model, but it does not account for the dynamic and changing nature of the production environment.

D. Ensuring that feature expectations are captured in the schema is a part of testing features and data, which the team has already done. The schema defines the expected format, type, and range of the features, and helps the team to validate and preprocess the data.

Option A is incorrect because migrating your model to TensorFlow, and training it using Vertex AI Training, is not the easiest way to improve the model’s training time. TensorFlow is a framework that allows you to create and train ML models using Python or other languages. Vertex AI Training is a service that allows you to train and optimize ML models using built-in algorithms or custom containers. However, this option requires significant code changes, as TensorFlow and scikit-learn have different APIs and functionalities. Moreover, this option does not leverage the parallelism or the scalability of the cloud, as it only uses a single instance.

Option B is incorrect because training your model in a distributed mode using multiple Compute Engine VMs, is not the most convenient way to improve the model’s training time. Compute Engine is a service that allows you to create and manage virtual machines that run on Google Cloud. You can use Compute Engine to run your scikit-learn model in a distributed mode, by using libraries such as Dask or Joblib. However, this option requires more effort and resources than option D, as it involves creating and configuring the VMs, installing and maintaining the libraries, and writing and running the distributed code.

Option C is incorrect because training your model with DLVM images on Vertex AI, and ensuring that your code utilizes NumPy and SciPy internal methods whenever possible, is not the most effective way to improve the model’s training time.  DLVM (Deep Learning Virtual Machine) images are preconfigured VM images that include popular ML frameworks and tools, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn 1 . You can use DLVM images on Vertex AI to train your scikit-learn model, by using a custom container. NumPy and SciPy are libraries that provide numerical and scientific computing functionalities for Python.  You can use NumPy and SciPy internal methods to optimize your scikit-learn code, as they are faster and more efficient than pure Python code 2 . However, this option does not leverage the parallelism or the scalability of the cloud, as it only uses a single instance.  Moreover, thi s option may not have a significant impact on the training time, as scikit-learn already relies on NumPy and SciPy for most of its operations 3 .

Option D is correct because training your model using Vertex AI Training with GPUs, is the best way to improve the model’s training time.  A GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is a hardware acceler ator that can perform parallel computations faster than a CPU (Central Processing Unit) 4 . Vertex AI Training is a service that allows you to train and optimize ML models using built-in algorithms or custom containers.  You can use Vertex AI Training with GPUs to train your scikit-learn model, by using a custom container and specify ing the accelerator type and count 5 . By using Vertex AI Training with GPUs, you can leverage the parallelism and the scalability of the cloud, and speed up the training process significantly, without changing your code.

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 queries 1 .  The ml.predict function returns a table with the predicted values, which can be saved to another BigQuery table 2 .

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 prediction 3 .  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 BigQuery 4 .

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 processing 5 . 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.

Option A is incorrect because using latitude, longitude, and product type as features, and using profit as model output is not the best way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option does not capture the interaction between latitude and longitude, which may affect the profitability of the product. For example, the same product may have different profitability in different regions, depending on the climate, culture, or preferences of the customers. Moreover, this option does not account for the granularity of the location data, which may be too fine or too coarse for the model. For example, using the exact coordinates of a city may not be meaningful, as the profitability may vary within the city, or using the country name may not be informative, as the profitability may vary across the country.

Option B is incorrect because using latitude, longitude, and product type as features, and using revenue and expenses as model outputs is not a suitable way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option has the same drawbacks as option A, as it does not capture the interaction between latitude and longitude, or account for the granularity of the location data. Moreover, this option does not directly predict the profitability of the product, which is the target variable of interest. Instead, it predicts the revenue and expenses of the product, which are intermediate variables that depend on other factors, such as the price, the cost, or the demand of the product. To obtain the profitability, we would need to subtract the expenses from the revenue, which may introduce errors or uncertainties in the prediction.

Option C is correct because using product type and the feature cross of latitude with longitude, followed by binning, as features, and using profit as model output is a good way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option captures the interaction between latitude and longitude, which may affect the profitability of the product, by creating a feature cross of these two features.  A feature cross is a synthetic feature that combines the values of two or more features into a single feature 1 . This option also accounts for the granularity of the location data, by binning the feature cross into discrete buckets.  Binning is a technique that groups continuous values into intervals, which can reduce the noise and complexity of the data 2 . Moreover, this option directly predicts the profitability of the product, which is the target variable of interest, by using it as the model output.

Option D is incorrect because using product type and the feature cross of latitude with longitude, followed by binning, as features, and using revenue and expenses as model outputs is not a valid way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option has the same advantages as option C, as it captures the interaction between latitude and longitude, and accounts for the granularity of the location data, by creating a feature cross and binning it. However, this option does not directly predict the profitability of the product, which is the target variable of interest, but rather predicts the revenue and expenses of the product, which are intermediate variables that depend on other factors, as explained in option B.

NVIDIA A100 GPUs are optimized for training complex models like Stable Diffusion XL. Using float32 precision ensures high model accuracy during training, whereas float16 or bfloat16 may cause lower precision in gradients, especially important for image editing. Distributing across multiple instances with T4 GPUs (Options C and D) would not speed up the process effectively due to lower power and more complex setup requirements.

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A Dataflow streaming pipeline is a cost-effective way to process large volumes of real-time data from sensors. The RunInference API is a Dataflow transform that allows you to run online predictions on your streaming data using your ML models. By using the RunInference API, you can avoid the latency and cost of using a separate prediction service. The automatic model refresh feature enables you to update your models in the pipeline without redeploying the pipeline. This way, you can ensure that your models are always up-to-date and accurate. By deploying a Dataflow streaming pipeline with the RunInference API and using automatic model refresh, you can achieve sub-millisecond predictions, 24/7 availability, and low operational overhead for your ML models.  References :

Dataflow documentation

RunInference API documentation

Automatic model refresh documentation

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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.

The best option for choosing a model that prioritizes detection while ensuring that more than 50% of the maintenance jobs triggered by the model address an imminent machine failure is to choose the model with the highest recall where precision is greater than 0.5. This option has the following advantages:

It maximizes the recall, which is the proportion of actual failures that are correctly predicted by the model. Recall is also known as sensitivity or true positive rate (TPR), and it is calculated as:

mathrmRecall=fracmathrmTPmathrmTP+mathrmFN

where TP is the number of true positives (actual failures that are predicted as failures) and FN is the number of false negatives (actual failures that are predicted as non-failures). By maximizing the recall, the model can reduce the number of false negatives, which are the most costly and undesirable outcomes for the predictive maintenance use case, as they represent missed failures that can lead to machine breakdown and downtime.

It constrains the precision, which is the proportion of predicted failures that are actual failures. Precision is also known as positive predictive value (PPV), and it is calculated as:

mathrmPrecision=fracmathrmTPmathrmTP+mathrmFP

where FP is the number of false positives (actual non-failures that are predicted as failures). By constraining the precision to be greater than 0.5, the model can ensure that more than 50% of the maintenance jobs triggered by the model address an imminent machine failure, which can avoid unnecessary or wasteful maintenance costs.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Choosing the model with the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC ROC) and precision greater than 0.5 may not prioritize detection, as the AUC ROC does not directly measure the recall. The AUC ROC is a summary metric that evaluates the overall performance of a binary classifier across all possible thresholds. The ROC curve plots the TPR (recall) against the false positive rate (FPR), which is the proportion of actual non-failures that are incorrectly predicted by the model. The AUC ROC is the area under the ROC curve, and it ranges from 0 to 1, where 1 represents a perfect classifier. However, choosing the model with the highest AUC ROC may not maximize the recall, as the AUC ROC is influenced by both the TPR and the FPR, and it does not account for the precision or the specificity (the proportion of actual non-failures that are correctly predicted by the model).

Option B: Choosing the model with the lowest root mean squared error (RMSE) and recall greater than 0.5 may not prioritize detection, as the RMSE is not a suitable metric for binary classification. The RMSE is a regression metric that measures the average magnitude of the error between the predicted and the actual values. The RMSE is calculated as:

mathrmRMSE=sqrtfrac1nsumi=1n​(yi​−hatyi​)2

where yi​ is the actual value, hatyi​ is the predicted value, and n is the number of observations. However, choosing the model with the lowest RMSE may not optimize the detection of failures, as the RMSE is sensitive to outliers and does not account for the class imbalance or the cost of misclassification.

Option D: Choosing the model with the highest precision where recall is greater than 0.5 may not prioritize detection, as the precision may not be the most important metric for the predictive maintenance use case. The precision measures the accuracy of the positive predictions, but it does not reflect the sensitivity or the coverage of the model. By choosing the model with the highest precision, the model may sacrifice the recall, which is the proportion of actual failures that are correctly predicted by the model. This may increase the number of false negatives, which are the most costly and undesirable outcomes for the predictive maintenance use case, as they represent missed failures that can lead to machine breakdown and downtime.

According to the official exam guide 1 , one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “design, build, and productionalize ML models to solve business challenges using Google Cloud technologies”.  Vertex AI AutoML Forecasting 2  is a service that allows you to train and deploy custom time-series forecasting models for batch prediction. Vertex AI AutoML Forecasting simplifies the model development process by providing a graphical user interface and a no-code approach. You can use Vertex AI AutoML Forecasting to train a model by using your tabular data, and specify the target variable, the covariates, and the time variable. Vertex AI AutoML Forecasting automatically handles the feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning. Therefore, option D is the best way to maximize the speed of model development and testing for the given use case. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Vertex AI AutoML Forecasting

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

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 ingest the Avro files from the Cloud Storage bucket and perform analytics on the structured data. Avro is a binary file format that can store complex data types and schemas. You can use the bq load command or the BigQuery API to load the Avro files into a BigQuery table. You can then use SQL queries to analyze the data and generate insights. Dataflow is a service that allows you to create and run scalable and portable data processing pipelines on Google Cloud. You can use Dataflow to create the features for your ML models, such as transforming, aggregating, and encoding the data. You can use the Apache Beam SDK to write your Dataflow pipeline code in Python or Java. You can also use the built-in transforms or custom transforms to apply the feature engineering logic to your data. Vertex AI Feature Store is a service that allows you to store and manage your ML features on Google Cloud. You can use Vertex AI Feature Store to host the features that your ML models use for online prediction. Online prediction is a type of prediction that provides low-latency responses to individual or small batches of input data. You can use the Vertex AI Feature Store API to write the features from your Dataflow pipeline to a feature store entity type. You can then use the Vertex AI Feature Store online serving API to read the features from the feature store and pass them to your ML models for online prediction. By using BigQuery, Dataflow, and Vertex AI Feature Store, you can configure a pipeline that performs analytics, creates features, and hosts the features that your ML models use for online prediction.  References :

BigQuery documentation

Dataflow documentation

Vertex AI Feature Store documentation

Preparing for Goo gle Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

According t o the web search results, BigQuery ML 1  is a service that allows you to create and execute machine learning models in BigQuery using SQL queries.  BigQuery ML supports various types of models, such as linear regression, logistic regression, k-means clustering, matrix factorization, deep neural networks, and time series forecasting 1 .  ARIMA_PLUS 2  is a statistical model for time series forecasting that is built in to BigQuery ML. ARIMA_PLUS stands for AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous regressors. ARIMA_PLUS models the relationship between a target variable and its past values, as well as other external factors that might influence the target variable.  ARIMA_PLUS can handle multiple time series, seasonality, holidays, and missing values 2 . Therefore, option C is the best way to use a solution that can be implemented quickly with minimal effort for the given use case, as it allows you to use SQL queries to build and run a forecasting model in BigQuery without moving the data or writing custom code. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

BigQuery ML

ARIMA_PLUS

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

Fine-tuning the model with a company-specific dataset aligns the model outputs with the brand voice, making it better suited for the company ' s objectives. Adjusting the temperature (Option A) affects randomness rather than content style, and changing token limits (Option C) does not impact tone. Replacing the model (Option D) is inefficient without guarantees of better alignment.

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 model 1 .  However, auto scaling depends on the CPU utilization of your prediction nodes, which is the percentage of CPU resources used by your model server 1 .  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 au to scaling will not trigger more replicas 2 .

On e possible reason for low CPU utilization is that your model server is using a single worker process to handle prediction requests 3 .  A worker process is a subprocess that runs your model code and handles prediction requests 3 .  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 high 3 .  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 parallel 3 .

To increase the number of workers i n 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 use 3 . 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 traffi c 1 .

 Using bfloat16 instead of float32 can reduce the memory usage and training time of the model, while having minimal impact on the accuracy. Bfloat16 is a 16-bit floating-point format that preserves the range of 32-bit floating-point numbers, but reduces the precision from 24 bits to 8 bits. This means that bfloat16 can store the same magnitude of numbers as float32, but with less detail. Bfloat16 is supported by TPUs and some GPUs, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for float32 in most cases. Bfloat16 can also improve the numerical stability of the model, as it reduces the risk of overflow and underflow errors.

Reducing the global batch size, the number of layers, or the dimensions of the images can also reduce the memory usage and training time of the model, but they can also affect the model’s accuracy and performance. Reducing the global batch size can make the model less stable and converge slower, as it reduces the amount of information available for each gradient update. Reducing the number of layers can make the model less expressive and powerful, as it reduces the depth and complexity of the network. Reducing the dimensions of the images can make the model less accurate and robust, as it reduces the resolution and quality of the input data.  References:

Bfloat16: The secret to high performance on Cloud TPUs

Bfloat16 floating-point format

How does Batch Size impact your model learning

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

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 TPUs 1 . 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 data 2 .  The Monitoring API is an interface that allows you to programmatically access and manipulate your monitoring data 3 .

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 usin g the AI Platform Training Python package 4 . 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 alerts 5 . Therefore, using AI Platform Training and Cloud Monitoring is the best option for this use case.

According to the official exam guide 1 , 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 Vision 2  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

Obj ect detection evaluation

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

Sampled Shapley is a fast and scalable approximation of the Shapley value, which is a game-theoretic concept that measures the contribution of each feature to the model prediction. Sampled Shapley is suitable for online prediction requests, as it can return feature attributions with minimal latency. The path count parameter controls the number of samples used to estimate the Shapley value, and a lower value means faster computation. Integrated Gradients is another explanation method that computes the average gradient along the path from a baseline input to the actual input. Integrated Gradients is more accurate than Sampled Shapley, but also more computationally intensive. Therefore, it is not recommended for online prediction requests, especially with a high path count. 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. Training-serving skew is the difference between the data used for training the model and the data used for serving the model. It can also affect the performance and accuracy of the model, and may indicate data quality issues or model staleness. Vertex AI Model Monitoring allows you to monitor training-serving skew on your deployed models and endpoints, and set up alerts and notifications when the skew exceeds a certain threshold. However, this is not relevant to the question, as the question is about the feature attributions of the model, not the data distribution.  References :

Vertex AI: Explanation methods

Vertex AI: Configuring explanations

Vertex AI: Monitoring prediction drift

Vertex AI: Monitoring training-serving skew

The best option to ensure real-time ingestion of the user activity data into BigQuery is to run a Dataflow streaming job to ingest the data into BigQuery. Dataflow is a fully managed service that can handle both batch and stream processing of data, and can integrate seamlessly with BigQuery and other Google Cloud services. Dataflow can also use Apache Beam as the programming model, which provides a unified and portable API for developing data pipelines. By using Dataflow, you can avoid the complexity and overhead of managing your own infrastructure, and focus on the logic and transformation of your data. Dataflow can also handle various types of data, such as structured, unstructured, or binary data, and can apply windowing, aggregation, and other operations on the data streams.

The other options are not optimal for the following reasons:

A. Configuring Pub/Sub to stream the data into BigQuery is not a good option, as Pub/Sub is a messaging service that can publish and subscribe to data streams, but cannot perform any transformation or processing on the data. Pub/Sub can be used as a source or a sink for Dataflow, but not as a standalone solution for ingesting data into BigQuery.

B. Running an Apache Spark streaming job on Dataproc to ingest the data into BigQuery is not a good option, as it requires setting up and managing your own cluster of virtual machines, which can increase the cost and complexity of your solution. Moreover, Apache Spark is not natively integrated with BigQuery, and requires using connectors or intermediate storage to write data to BigQuery, which can introduce latency and inefficiency.

D. Configuring Pub/Sub and a Dataflow streaming job to ingest the data into BigQuery is not a bad option, but it is not necessary, as Dataflow can directly read data from the mobile applications without using Pub/Sub as an intermediary. Using Pub/Sub can add an extra layer of abstraction and reliability, but it can also increase the cost and complexity of your solution, and introduce some delay in the data ingestion.

Qua ntization  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 model 1 .

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 accuracy 2 .

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 overfitti ng 3 .

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 deployment 4

According to the official exam guide 1 , 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 Transform 2  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 Beam 3  is an open source framework for building scalable and portable data pipelines. Apache Beam supports both batch and streaming data processing.  Dataflow 4  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

 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

To configure a model retraining policy that minimizes cost, you should follow these steps:

Download the weather data each week, and download the flu data each month. This way, you can keep your data up to date with the latest information available, without downloading unnecessary or redundant data.

Deploy the model to a Vertex AI endpoint with feature drift monitoring.  This feature allows you to detect when the distribution of the input data changes significantly from the training data, which could affect the model performance 1 .

Retrain the model if a monitoring alert is detected. This way, you can update your model only when needed, instead of retraining it on a fixed schedule, which could incur more cost and time.

 In this scenario, the goal is to speed up model training for a CNN-based architecture on Google Cloud. The code does not include any manual device placement and has not been wrapped in Estimator model-level abstraction. Given these constraints, the best environment to train the model on would be a Deep Learning VM with an n1-standard-2 machine and 1 GPU with all libraries pre-installed. Option C is the correct answer.

Option C: A Deep Learning VM with an n1-standard-2 machine and 1 GPU with all libraries pre-installed. This option is the most suitable for the scenario because it provides a ready-to-use environment for deep learning on Google Cloud. A Deep Learning VM is a specialized VM image that is pre-installed with popular deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and more. A Deep Learning VM also comes with NVIDIA GPU drivers and CUDA libraries that enable GPU acceleration for model training. A Deep Learning VM can be easily configured and launched from the Google Cloud Console or the Cloud SDK. An n1-standard-2 machine is a general-purpose machine type that provides 2 vCPUs and 7.5 GB of memory. This machine type can be sufficient for running a CNN-based architecture. A GPU is a specialized hardware accelerator that can speed up the computation of matrix operations and convolutions, which are common in CNN-based architectures. By using a Deep Learning VM with an n1-standard-2 machine and 1 GPU, the model training can be significantly faster than on an on-premises CPU-only infrastructure.

Option A: A VM on Compute Engine and 1 TPU with all dependencies installed manually. This option is not suitable for the scenario because it requires manual installation of dependencies and device placement. A TPU is a custom-designed ASIC that can provide high performance and efficiency for TensorFlow models. However, to use a TPU, the code needs to include manual device placement and be wrapped in Estimator model-level abstraction. Moreover, to use a TPU, the dependencies such as TensorFlow, Cloud TPU Client, and Cloud Storage need to be installed manually on the VM. This option can be complex and time-consuming to set up and may not be compatible with the existing code.

Option B: A VM on Compute Engine and 8 GPUs with all dependencies installed manually. This option is not suitable for the scenario because it requires manual installation of dependencies and may not be cost-effective. While using 8 GPUs can provide high parallelism and speed for model training, it also increases the cost and complexity of the environment. Moreover, to use GPUs, the dependencies such as NVIDIA GPU drivers, CUDA libraries, and deep learning frameworks need to be installed manually on the VM. This option can be tedious and error-prone to set up and may not be necessary for the scenario.

Option D: A Deep Learning VM with more powerful CPU e2-highcpu-16 machines with all libraries pre-installed. This option is not suitable for the scenario because it does not leverage GPU acceleration for model training. While using more powerful CPU machines can provide more compute resources and memory for model training, it may not be as fast and efficient as using GPU machines. CPU machines are not optimized for matrix operations and convolutions, which are common in CNN-based architectures. Moreover, using more powerful CPU machines can also increase the cost of the environment. This option can be suboptimal and wasteful for the scenario.

According to the web search results, RunInference API 1  is a feature of Apache Beam that enables you to run models as part of your pipeline in a way that is optimized for machine learning inference. RunInference API supports features like batching, caching, and model reloading.  RunInference API can be used with various frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyT orch, Sklearn, XGBoost, ONNX, and TensorRT 1 .  Dataflow 2  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 reconfigure the architecture for the given use case, as it allows you to use the RunInference API with watchFilePattern in a Dataflow job that wraps around the model and serves predictions.  This way, you can minimize prediction latency and the effort required to update the model, as the RunInference API wi ll automatically reload the model from the Cloud Storage bucket whenever there is a change in the model file 1 . The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

RunInference API

Dataflow

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

According to the official exam guide 1 , one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “configure and optimize model training jobs”.  Cloud TPU VMs 2  are a new way to access Cloud TPUs directly on the TPU host machines, offering a simpler and more flexible user experience. Cloud TPU VMs are optimized for ML model training and can reduce training time and cost.  You can use Cloud TPU VMs to train Transformer models in TensorFlow by using the tf.distribute.TPUStrategy 3 , which handles the distribution of computations across the TPU cores. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Cloud TPU VMs

Distributed training with TPUStrategy

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Ques tions

Kubeflow Pipelines allows for efficient use of compute resources through parallel task execution and caching, which eliminates redundant executions 1 . 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

 Vertex AI Experiments is a managed service that allows you to track, compare, and manage experiments with Vertex AI. You can use Vertex AI Experiments to record the parameters, metrics, and artifacts of each pipeline run, and compare them in a graphical interface. Vertex AI TensorBoard is a tool that lets you visualize the metrics of your models, such as accuracy, loss, and learning curves. By logging metrics to Vertex ML Metadata and using Vertex AI Experiments and TensorBoard, you can easily collaborate with your team and find the best model configuration for your problem.  References :  Vertex AI Pipelines: Metrics visualization and run comparison using the KFP SDK ,  Track, compare, manage experiments with Vertex AI Experiments ,  Vertex AI Pipelines

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

 The best option for training an ML model on a large dataset, using a TPU to accelerate the training process, and discovering that the TPU is not reaching its full capacity, is to increase the batch size. This option allows you to leverage the power and simplicity of TPUs to train your model faster and more efficiently. A TPU is a custom-developed application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that can accelerate machine learning workloads. A TPU can provide high performance and scalability for various types of models, such as linear regression, logistic regression, k-means clustering, matrix factorization, and deep neural networks. A TPU can also support various tools and frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX. A batch size is a parameter that specifies the number of training examples in one forward/backward pass. A batch size can affect the speed and accuracy of the training process. A larger batch size can help you utilize the parallel processing power of the TPU, and reduce the communication overhead between the TPU and the host CPU. A larger batch size can also help you avoid overfitting, as it can reduce the variance of the gradient updates.  By increasing the batch size, you can train your model on a large dataset faster and mo re efficiently, and make full use of the TPU capacity 1 .

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

Option A: Increasing the learning rate would not help you utilize the parallel processing power of the TPU, and could cause errors or poor performance. A learning rate is a parameter that controls how much the model is updated in each iteration. A learning rate can affect the speed and accuracy of the training process. A larger learning rate can help you converge faster, but it can also cause instability, divergence, or oscillation.  By increasing the learning rate, you may not be able t o find the optimal solution, and your model may perform poorly on the validation or test data 2 .

Option B: Increasing the number of epochs would not help you utilize the parallel processing power of the TPU, and could increase the complexity and cost of the training process. An epoch is a measure of the number of times all of the training examples are used once in the training process. An epoch can affect the speed and accuracy of the training process. A larger number of epochs can help you learn more from the data, but it can also cause overfitting, underfitting, or diminishing returns.  By increasing the number of epochs, you may not be able to improve the model performance significantly, and your training process may take longer and consume more resources 3 .

Option C: Decreasing the learning rate would not help you utilize the parallel processing power of the TPU, and could slow down the training process. A learning rate is a parameter that controls how much the model is updated in each iteration. A learning rate can affect the speed and accuracy of the training process. A smaller learning rate can help you find a more precise solution, but it can also cause slow convergence or local minima.  By decreasing the learning rate, you may not be able to reach the optimal solution in a reasonable time, and your training process may take longer 2 .

 Online inference is a process where you send a single or a small number of predict ion requests to a model and get immediate responses 1 . 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 prov ides a service URL for prediction requests 2 .

Vertex AI Model Registry is a central repository where you can manage the lifecycle of your ML models 3 .  You can import models from various sources, such as custom models or AutoML models, and assign them to different versions and aliases 3 .  You can also deploy models to endpoints, which are resources that provide a service URL for online prediction 2 .

By importing the model into Vertex AI Model Registry, you can leverage the Vertex AI features to monitor and update the model 3 . 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 requests 2 .  Vertex AI Prediction provides various benefits, such as scalability, re liability, security, and logging 2 .  You can use the Vertex AI API or the Google Cloud console to send online inference requests to the endpoint and get immediate classifications 4 .

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.

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 man age 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.

According to the official exam guide 1 , one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “design, build, and productionalize ML models to solve business challenges using Google Cloud technologies”.  The Vertex AI Vision Occupancy Analytics model 2  is a specialized pre-built vision model that lets you count people or vehicles given specific inputs you add in video frames. It provides advanced features such as active zones counting, line crossing counting, and dwelling detection. This model is suitable for the use case of detecting the number of customers waiting for service in near real time.  You can easily create and deploy an occupancy analytics application using Vertex AI Vision 3 . The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Occupancy analytics guide

Create an occupancy analytics app with BigQuery forecasting

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

The best option for analyzing large and complex datasets while minimizing computational resources is to use a combination of BigQuery and Vertex AI Workbench. BigQuery is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse that can perform fast and interactive queries on petabytes of data. BigQuery can calculate descriptive statistics such as mean, median, and mode by using SQL functions such as AVG, PERCENTILE_CONT, and MODE. Vertex AI Workbench is a managed 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 visualization and statistical analysis. Vertex AI Workbench can connect to BigQuery and use the results of the queries to create time plots and run statistical tests for hypothesis testing. By using BigQuery and Vertex AI Workbench, users can leverage the power and flexibility of Google Cloud to perform exploratory data analysis on large and complex datasets.  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, 1.1 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

To organize the artifacts for dozens of pipelines, you should store the parameters in Vertex ML Metadata, store the models’ source code in GitHub, and store the models’ binaries in Cloud Storage. This option has the following advantages:

Vertex ML Metadata is a service that helps you track and manage the metadata of your ML workflows, such as datasets, models, metrics, and parameters 1 .  It can also help you with data lineage, model versioning, and model performance monitoring 2 .

GitHub is a popular platform for hosting and collaborating on code repositories.  It can help you manage the source code of your models, as well as the configuration files, scripts, and notebooks that are part of your ML pipelines 3 .

Cloud Storage is a scalable and durable object storage service that can store any type of data, including model binaries 4 .  It can also integrate with other services, such as Vertex AI, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run, to enable easy deployment and serving of your models 5 .

 Vertex AI Experiments is a service that allows you to track, compare, and optimize your ML experiments on Google Cloud. You can use Vertex AI Experiments to log metrics and parameters from your TensorFlow models, and then visualize them in Vertex AI TensorBoard. Vertex AI TensorBoard is a managed service that provides a web interface for viewing and debugging your ML experiments. You can use Vertex AI TensorBoard to compare different runs, inspect model graphs, analyze scalars, histograms, images, and more. By using Vertex AI Experiments and Vertex AI TensorBoard, you can simplify your ML experiment tracking and visualization workflow, and avoid the overhead of setting up and maintaining your own Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage buckets, or VMs.  References :

[Vertex AI Experiments documentation]

[Vertex AI TensorBoard documentation]

Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate

 The best option for accessing internal data in the most secure way, while mitigating the risk of data exfiltration, is to enable VPC Service Controls for peerings, and add Vertex AI to a service perimeter. This option allows you to leverage the power and simplicity of VPC Service Controls to isolate and protect your data and services on Google Cloud. VPC Service Controls is a service that can create a secure perimeter around your Google Cloud resources, such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Vertex AI. VPC Service Controls can help you prevent unauthorized access and data exfiltration from your perimeter, and enforce fine-grained access policies based on context and identity. Peerings are connections that can allow traffic to flow between different networks. Peerings can help you connect your Google Cloud network with other Google Cloud networks or external networks, and enable communication between your resources and services. By enabling VPC Service Controls for peerings, you can allow your training code to download internal data by using an API endpoint hosted in your project’s network, and restrict the data transfer to only authorized networks and services. Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and deploying machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. Vertex AI can support various types of models, such as linear regression, logistic regression, k-means clustering, matrix factorization, and deep neural networks. Vertex AI can also provide various tools and services for data analysis, model development, model deployment, model monitoring, and model governance.  By adding Vertex AI to a service perimeter, you can isolate and protect your Vertex AI resources, such as models, endpoints, pi pelines, and feature store, and prevent data exfiltration from your perimeter 1 .

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

Option B: Creating a Cloud Run endpoint as a proxy to the data, and using Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication to secure access to the endpoint from the training job would require more skills and steps than enabling VPC Service Controls for peerings, and adding Vertex AI to a service perimeter. Cloud Run is a service that can run your stateless containers on a fully managed environment or on your own Google Kubernetes Engine cluster. Cloud Run can help you deploy and scale your containerized applications quickly and easily, and pay only for the resources you use. A Cloud Run endpoint is a URL that can expose your containerized application to the internet or to other Google Cloud services. A Cloud Run endpoint can help you access and invoke your application from anywhere, and handle the load balancing and traffic routing. A proxy is a server that can act as an intermediary between a client and a target server. A proxy can help you modify, filter, or redirect the requests and responses between the client and the target server, and provide additional functionality or security. IAM is a service that can manage access control for Google Cloud resources. IAM can help you define who (identity) has what access (role) to which resource, and enforce the access policies. By creating a Cloud Run endpoint as a proxy to the data, and using IAM authentication to secure access to the endpoint from the training job, you can access internal data by using an API endpoint hosted in your project’s network, and restrict the data access to only authorized identities and roles. However, creating a Cloud Run endpoint as a proxy to the data, and using IAM authentication to secure access to the endpoint from the training job would require more skills and steps than enabling VPC Service Controls for peerings, and adding Vertex AI to a service perimeter. You would need to write code, create and configure the Cloud Run endpoint, implement the proxy logic, deploy and monitor the Cloud Run endpoint, and set up the IAM policies.  Moreover, this option would not prevent data exfiltration from your network, as the Cloud Run endpoint can be accessed from outside your network 2 .

Option C: Configuring VPC Peering with Vertex AI and specifying the network of the training job would not allow you to access internal data by using an API endpoint hosted in your project’s network, and could cause errors or poor performance. VPC Peering is a service that can create a peering connection between two VPC networks. VPC Peering can help you connect your Google Cloud network with another Google Cloud network or an external network, and enable communication between your resources and services. By configuring VPC Peering with Vertex AI and specifying the network of the training job, you can allow your training code to access Vertex AI resources, such as models, endpoints, pipelines, and feature store, and use the same network for the training job. However, configuring VPC Peering with Vertex AI and specifying the network of the training job would not allow you to access internal data by using an API endpoint hosted in your project’s network, and could cause errors or poor performance. You would need to write code, create and configure the VPC Peering connection, and specify the network of the training job.  Moreover, this option would not isolate and protect your data and services on Go ogle Cloud, as the VPC Peering connection can expose your network to other networks and services 3 .

Option D: Downloading the data to a Cloud Storage bucket before calling the training job would not allow you to access internal data by using an API endpoint hosted in your project’s network, and could increase the complexity and cost of the data access. Cloud Storage is a service that can store and manage your data on Google Cloud. Cloud Storage can help you upload and organize your data, and track the data versions and metadata. A Cloud Storage bucket is a container that can hold your data on Cloud Storage. A Cloud Storage bucket can help you store and access your data from anywhere, and provide various storage classes and options. By downloading the data to a Cloud Storage bucket before calling the training job, you can access the data from Cloud Storage, and use it as the input for the training job. However, downloading the data to a Cloud Storage bucket before calling the training job would not allow you to access internal data by using an API endpoint hosted in your project’s network, and could increase the complexity and cost of the data access. You would need to write code, create and configure the Cloud Storage bucket, download the data to the Cloud Storage bucket, and call the training job.  Moreover, this option would create an intermediate data source on Cloud Storage, which can increase the storage and transfer costs, and expose the data to unauthorized access or data exfiltration 4 .

 This answer is correct because it allows AutoML Tables to handle the time signal in the data and split the data accordingly. This ensures that the model is trained on the historical data and evaluated on the more recent data, which is consistent with the prediction task. AutoML Tables can automatically detect and handle temporal features in the data, such as date, time, and duration. By specifying the Time column, AutoML Tables can also perform time-series forecasting and use the time signal to generate additional features, such as seasonality and trend.  References:

[AutoML Tables: Preparing your training data]

[AutoML Tables: Time-series forecasting]

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 colors 1 .

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 space 2 .

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 ar e 2^10,000 possible combinations of boolean values, which is impractical to store and process 3 .

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 categories 4 .

The core requirement here is handling fluctuating traffic (spikes up to 4x capacity) in a cost-effective way.

Horizontal Autoscaling: Vertex AI endpoints support autoscaling by setting a min-replica-count and a max-replica-count. By increasing the maximum replicas to 6 (Option B), the service can scale out horizontally to meet the 4x traffic demand and, more importantly, scale back down when traffic subsides. This prevents paying for idle resources.

Why other options are incorrect:

Option A: TPUs are designed for training large neural networks (TensorFlow/JAX/PyTorch). They are not supported for standard scikit-learn deployments and would be extremely over-provisioned/expensive for this use case.

Option C: Switching to a massive 32-vCPU machine (Vertical Scaling) is expensive because you pay for that high capacity 24/7, even when traffic is low. It lacks the elasticity needed for fluctuating loads.

Option D: Manual intervention based on alerts is slow and prone to downtime during traffic spikes. Vertex AI ' s native autoscaling is the managed, automated way to handle this.

The best option for adding explanations to your model code with minimal effort and providing explanations that are as accurate as possible is to upload the custom model to Vertex AI Model Registry and configure feature-based attribution by using sampled Shapley with input baselines. This option allows you to leverage the power and simplicity of Vertex Explainable AI to generate feature attributions for each prediction, and understand how each feature contributes to the model output. Vertex Explainable AI is a service that can help you understand and interpret predictions made by your machine learning models, natively integrated with a number of Google’s products and services. Vertex Explainable AI can provide feature-based and example-based explanations to provide better understanding of model decision making. Feature-based explanations are explanations that show how much each feature in the input influenced the prediction. Feature-based explanations can help you debug and improve model performance, build confidence in the predictions, and understand when and why things go wrong. Vertex Explainable AI supports various feature attribution methods, such as sampled Shapley, integrated gradients, and XRAI. Sampled Shapley is a feature attribution method that is based on the Shapley value, which is a concept from game theory that measures how much each player in a cooperative game contributes to the total payoff. Sampled Shapley approximates the Shapley value for each feature by sampling different subsets of features, and computing the marginal contribution of each feature to the prediction. Sampled Shapley can provide accurate and consistent feature attributions, but it can also be computationally expensive. To reduce the computation cost, you can use input baselines, which are reference inputs that are used to compare with the actual inputs. Input baselines can help you define the starting point or the default state of the features, and calculate the feature attributions relative to the input baselines.  By uploading the custom model to Vertex AI Model Registry and configuring feature-based attribution by using sampled Shapley with input baselines, you can add explanations to your model code with minimal effort and provide expl anations that are as accurate as possible 1 .

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

Option A: Creating an AutoML tabular model by using the BigQuery data with integrated Vertex Explainable AI would require more skills and steps than uploading the custom model to Vertex AI Model Registry and configuring feature-based attribution by using sampled Shapley with input baselines. AutoML tabular is a service that can automatically build and train machine learning models for structured or tabular data. AutoML tabular can use BigQuery as the data source, and provide feature-based explanations by using integrated gradients as the feature attribution method. However, creating an AutoML tabular model by using the BigQuery data with integrated Vertex Explainable AI would require more skills and steps than uploading the custom model to Vertex AI Model Registry and configuring feature-based attribution by using sampled Shapley with input baselines. You would need to create a new AutoML tabular model, import the BigQuery data, configure the model settings, train and evaluate the model, and deploy the model.  Moreover, this option would not use your existing custom model, which is already performing well, but create a new model, which may not have the same performance or behavior as your custom model 2 .

Option B: Creating a BigQuery ML deep neural network model, and using the ML.EXPLAIN_PREDICT method with the num_integral_steps parameter would not allow you to deploy the model to production, and could provide less accurate explanations than using sampled Shapley with input baselines. BigQuery ML is a service that can create and train machine learning models by using SQL queries on BigQuery. BigQuery ML can create a deep neural network model, which is a type of machine learning model that consists of multiple layers of neurons, and can learn complex patterns and relationships from the data. BigQuery ML can also provide feature-based explanations by using the ML.EXPLAIN_PREDICT method, which is a SQL function that returns the feature attributions for each prediction. The ML.EXPLAIN_PREDICT method uses integrated gradients as the feature attribution method, which is a method that calculates the average gradient of the prediction output with respect to the feature values along the path from the input baseline to the input. The num_integral_steps parameter is a parameter that determines the number of steps along the path from the input baseline to the input. However, creating a BigQuery ML deep neural network model, and using the ML.EXPLAIN_PREDICT method with the num_integral_steps parameter would not allow you to deploy the model to production, and could provide less accurate explanations than using sampled Shapley with input baselines. BigQuery ML does not support deploying the model to Vertex AI Endpoints, which is a service that can provide low-latency predictions for individual instances. BigQuery ML only supports batch prediction, which is a service that can provide high-throughput predictions for a large batch of instances.  Moreover, integrated gradients can provide less accurate and consistent explanations than sampled Shapley, as integrated gradients can be sensitive to the choice of the input baseline and the num_integral_s teps parameter 3 .

Option D: Updating the custom serving container to include sampled Shapley-based explanations in the prediction outputs would require more skills and steps than uploading the custom model to Vertex AI Model Registry and configuring feature-based attribution by using sampled Shapley with input baselines. A custom serving container is a container image that contains the model, the dependencies, and a web server. A custom serving container can help you customize the prediction behavior of your model, and handle complex or non-standard data formats. However, updating the custom serving container to include sampled Shapley-based explanations in the prediction outputs would require more skills and steps than uploading the custom model to Vertex AI Model Registry and configuring feature-based attribution by using sampled Shapley with input baselines. You would need to write code, implement the sampled Shapley algorithm, build and test the container image, and upload and deploy the container image.  Moreover, this option would not leverage the power and simplicity of Vertex Explain able AI, which can provide feature-based explanations natively integrated with Vertex AI services 4 .

According to the official exam gui de 1 , one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “design, build, and productionalize ML models to solve business challenges using Google Cloud technologies”.  Document AI 2  is a document understanding platform that takes unstructured data from documents and transforms it into structured data, making it easier to understand, analyze, and consume.  Documen t AI Workbench 3  allows you to create custom extractors to parse the text in specific sections of your documents.  Natural Language API 4  is a service that provides natural language understanding technologies, such as sentiment analysis, entity analysis, and other text annotations.  The analyzeSentiment feature 5  inspects the given text and identifies the prevailing emotional opinion within the text, especially to determine a writer’s attitude as positive, negative, or neutral. Therefore, option C is the best way to accomplish the task of predicting an overall satisfaction score from the customer comments on each form. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario.  References :

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Document AI

Document AI Workbench

Natural Language API

Sentiment analysis

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Ac tual Free Exam Questions

TPU VMs with TPUv3 Pod slices are the most scalable and performant option for training large-scale recommender models on Google Cloud. TPUv3 Pods can provide up to 2048 cores and 32 TB of memory, and can process billions of examples and features in minutes. The TPUEmbedding API is designed to efficiently handle large-scale categorical features and embeddings, and can reduce the memory footprint and communication overhead of the model. The other options are either less scalable (B and C) or less efficient (D) for this use case.

Option A is incorrect because creating a new model that uses the raw data and is available in real time would require retraining the model and deploying it again, which is not efficient or scalable.

Option B is incorrect because using a Dataflow job to transform the incoming data would introduce unnecessary latency and complexity for online prediction, which requires fast and simple processing.

Option C is incorrect because using Cloud Spanner to stream and query the incoming data would incur high costs and overhead for online prediction, which does not need a relational database.

Option D is correct because using a Cloud Function to preprocess the data and submit a prediction request to Al Platform is a simple and scalable solution for online prediction, which leverages the serverless and event-driven features of Cloud Functions.

 Customer churn is a binary classification problem, where the target variable is whether a customer has churned or not. Therefore, a logistic regression model is more suitable than a linear regression model, which is used for regression problems.  A logistic regression model can output the probability of a customer churning, which can be used to rank the customers by their churn risk and take appropriate actions 1 .

BigQuery ML is a service that allows you to create and execute machine learning models in BigQuery using standard SQL queries 2 .  You can use BigQuery ML to create a logistic regression model for customer churn prediction by using the  CREATE MODEL  statement and specifying the  LOGISTIC_REG  model type 3 .  You can use the historical customer data as the input table for the mo del, and specify the features and the label columns 3 .

Vertex AI Model Registry is a central repository where you can manage the lifecycle of your ML models 4 .  You can import models from various sources, such as BigQuery ML, AutoML, or custom models, and assign them to different versions and aliases 4 . You can also deploy models to endpoints, which are resources that provide a service URL for online prediction.

By registering the BigQuery ML model in Vertex AI Model Registry, you can leverage the Vertex AI features to evaluate and monitor the model performance 4 . 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.

The other options are not suitable for your scenario, because they either use the wrong model type, such as linear regression, or they do not use Vertex AI to evaluate the model performance, which would limit the insights and actions you can take based on the model results.

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 0 1 .  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 words 2 .

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 space 3 .  Word embeddings can be learned from a large corpus of text using neural networks, such as word2vec, GloVe, or BERT 4 .  Using pre-trained word embeddings can save time and resources, and improve the performance of the natural lang uage model, especially when the training data is limited or noisy 5 .

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.

This scenario requires balancing customization with cost-efficiency using Vertex AI Workbench.

Custom Container Images: Since the team requires specific, pre-installed packages that are not part of the standard Google Deep Learning Containers (DLC), creating a custom image derived from a DLC is the most efficient way to ensure environment consistency across instances.

Cost Management: To minimize costs, " Idle Shutdown " is a critical feature. It automatically stops the notebook instance when it is not in use, ensuring you only pay for compute time actually utilized.

Why Option C is better than D: The prompt explicitly states that each data scientist has different VM CPU and RAM requirements. Setting a fixed " default " machine type like n1-standard-4 (Option D) contradicts the requirement to cater to different hardware needs and could lead to over-provisioning (wasted cost) or under-provisioning for specific users. Option C focuses on the custom image and the cost-saving mechanism (Idle Shutdown) while allowing for hardware flexibility.

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.

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 BigQuer yClient in TensorFlow to read the data directly from BigQuery, which is a convenient and fast way to access the data for training the model 1 .

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.

 The end-to-end architecture of the predictive model for estimating delay times for multiple transportation routes should be configured using Kubeflow Pipelines. Kubeflow Pipelines is a platform for building and deploying scalable, portable, and reusable machine learning pipelines on Kubernetes. Kubeflow Pipelines allows you to orchestrate your multi-step workflow from data preparation, model training, model evaluation, model deployment, and model serving.  Kubeflow Pipelines also provides a user interface for managing and tracking your pipeline runs, experiments, an d artifacts 1

Using Kubeflow Pipelines has several advantages for this use case:

Full automation: You can define your pipeline as a Python script that specifies the steps and dependencies of your workflow, and use the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to compile and upload your pipeline to the Kubeflow Pipelines service.  You can also use the Kubeflow Pipelines UI to create, run, and monitor your pipeline 2

Scalability: You can leverage the power of Kubernetes to scale your pipeline components horizontally and vertically, and use distributed training frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch to train your model on multiple nodes or GPUs 3

Portability: You can package your pipeline components as Docker containers that can run on any Kubernetes cluster, and use the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to export and import your pipeline packages across different environments 4

Reusability: You can reuse your pipeline components across different pipelines, and share your components with other users through the Kubeflow Pipelines Component Store.  You can also use pre-built components from the Kubeflow Pipelines library or other sources 5

Schedulability: You can use the Kubeflow Pipelines UI or the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to schedule recurring pipeline runs based on cron expressions or intervals. For example, you can schedule your pipeline to run every month to retrain your model on the latest data.

The other options are not as suitable for this use case. Using a model trained and deployed on BigQuery ML is not recommended, as BigQuery ML is mainly designed for simple and quick machine learning tasks on large-scale data, and does not support complex models or custom code. Writing a Cloud Functions script that launches a training and deploying job on AI Platform is not ideal, as Cloud Functions has limitations on the memory, CPU, and execution time, and does not provide a user interface for managing and tracking your pipeline. Using Cloud Composer to programmatically schedule a Dataflow job that executes the workflow from training to deploying your model is not optimal, as Dataflow is mainly designed for data processing and streaming analytics, and does not support model serving or monitoring.

According to the official exam guide 1 , one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “configure and optimize model monitoring jobs”.  Vertex AI Model Monitoring documentation states that “m odel 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 dri ft 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 Guid e

Vertex AI Model Monitoring

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

BigQuery is a serverless, scalable, and cost-effective data warehouse that allows users to run SQL queries on large volumes of data. BigQuery Load is a tool that can ingest data from Cloud Storage into BigQuery tables. BigQuery SQL is a dialect of SQL that supports many of the same functions and operations as PySpark, such as window functions, aggregate functions, joins, and subqueries. By using BigQuery Load and BigQuery SQL, you can rebuild your ML pipeline for structured data on Google Cloud without having to manage any servers or clusters, and with faster performance and lower cost than using PySpark on Dataproc. You can also use BigQuery ML to create and evaluate ML models using SQL commands.  References:

BigQuery documentation

BigQuery Load documentation

BigQuery SQL reference

BigQuery ML documentation

 A cloud-based backend system is a system that runs on a cloud platform and provides services or resources to other applications or users.  A cloud-based backend system can be used to submit training jobs, which are tasks that involve training a machine learning model on a given dataset using a specific framework and configuration 1

However, a cloud-based backend system can also have some drawbacks, such as:

High maintenance: A cloud-based backend system may require a lot of administration and management, such as provisioning, scaling, monitoring, and troubleshooting the cloud resources and services.  This can be time-consuming and costly, and may distract fr om the core business objectives 2

Low flexibility: A cloud-based backend system may not support all the frameworks and libraries that the data scientists need to use for their training jobs.  This can limit the choices and capabilities of the data scientists, and affect the quality and performance of their models 3

Poor integration: A cloud-based backend system may not integrate well with other cloud services or tools that the data scientists need to use for their machine learning workflows, such as data processing, model deployment, or model monitoring. This can create compatibility and interoperability issues, and reduce the efficiency and productivity of the data scientists.

Therefore, it may be better to use a managed service instead of a cloud-based backend system to submit training jobs. A managed service is a service that is provided and operated by a third-party provider, and offers various benefits, such as:

Low maintenance: A managed service handles the administration and management of the cloud resources and services, and abstracts away the complexity and details of the underlying infrastructure.  This can save time and money, and all ow the data scientists to focus on their core tasks 2

High flexibility: A managed service can support multiple frameworks and libraries that the data scientists need to use for their training jobs, and allow them to customize and configure their training environments and parameters.  This can enhance the choices and capabilities of the data scientists, and improve the quality and performance of their models 3

Easy integration: A managed service can integrate seamlessly with other cloud services or tools that the data scientists need to use for their machine learning workflows, and provide a unified and consistent interface and experience. This can solve the compatibility and interoperability issues, and increase the efficiency and productivity of the data scientists.

One of the best options for using a managed service to submit training jobs is to use the AI Platform custom containers feature to receive training jobs using any framework. AI Platform is a Google Cloud service that provides a platform for building, deploying, and managing machine learning models. AI Platform supports various machine learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, and XGBoost, and provides various features, such as hyperparameter tuning, distributed training, online prediction, and model monitoring.

The AI Platform custom containers feature allows the data scientists to use any framework or library that they want for their training jobs, and package their training application and dependencies as a Docker container image. The data scientists can then submit their training jobs to AI Platform, and specify the container image and the training parameters. AI Platform will run the training jobs on the cloud infrastructure, and handle the scaling, logging, and monitoring of the training jobs. The data scientists can also use the AI Platform features to optimize, deploy, and manage their models.

The other options are not as suitable or feasible. Configuring Kubeflow to run on Google Kubernetes Engine and receive training jobs through TFJob is not ideal, as Kubeflow is mainly designed for TensorFlow-based training jobs, and does not support other frameworks or libraries. Creating a library of VM images on Compute Engine and publishing these images on a centralized repository is not optimal, as Compute Engine is a low-level service that requires a lot of administration and management, and does not provide the features and integrations of AI Platform. Setting up Slurm workload manager to receive jobs that can be scheduled to run on your cloud infrastructure is not relevant, as Slurm is a tool for managing and scheduling jobs on a cluster of nodes, and does not provide a managed service for training jobs.

 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

AI Platform supports hyperparameter tuning for PyTorch models using custom containers. This allows you to use any Python dependencies and libraries that are not included in the pre-built AI Platform Training runtime versions. You can also use a pre-trained model such as ResNet as a base for your custom model. To run a hyperparameter tuning job on AI Platform using custom containers, you need to do the following steps:

Create a Dockerfile that defines the container image for your training application. The Dockerfile should install PyTorch and any other dependencies, copy your training code and configuration files, and set the entrypoint for the container.

Build the container image and push it to Container Registry or another accessible registry.

Create a YAML file that defines the configuration for your hyperparameter tuning job. The YAML file should specify the container image URI, the training input and output paths, the hyperparameters to tune, the metric to optimize, and the tuning algorithm and budget.

Submit the hyperparameter tuning job to AI Platform using the gcloud command-line tool or the AI Platform Training API.

AutoML Edge  is a service that allows you to train and deploy custom image classification models for mobile devices 1 2 .  It supports exporting models as  Core ML  files, which are compatible with iOS applications 3 .

Using a Core ML model directly on the device eliminates the need for network requests and reduces prediction latency. It also minimizes the cost of serving predictions, as there is no need to pay for cloud resources or network bandwidth.

Option A is incorrect because sending batch requests during prediction does not reduce latency, as the requests still need to be processed by the cloud service. It also incurs more cost than using a local model on the device.

Option C is incorrect because TFLite models are not compatible with iOS applications.  TFLite models are designed for Android and other platforms that support TensorFlow Lite 4 .

Option D is incorrect because exposing the model as a Vertex AI endpoint requires network requests and cloud resources, which increase latency and cost. It also does not leverage the benefits of AutoML Edge, which is optimized for mobile devices.

A feature cross is a synthetic feature that is obtained by combining two or more existing features, usually by taking their product or concatenation. A feature cross can help to capture the nonlinear and interaction effects between the original features, and improve the predictive performance of the model.  A feature cross can be applied to different types of features, such as numeric, categorical, or geospatial features 1 .

For the use case of building an ML model to predict car sales in different cities around the world, the best option is to use one feature obtained as an element-wise product between binned latitude, binned longitude, and one-hot encoded car type. This option involves creating a feature cross that combines three individual features: binned latitude, binned longitude, and one-hot encoded car type. Binning is a technique that transforms a continuous numeric feature into a discrete categorical feature by dividing its range into equal intervals, or bins. One-hot encoding is a technique that transforms a categorical feature into a binary vector, where each element corresponds to a possible category, and has a value of 1 if the feature belongs to that category, and 0 otherwise. By applying binning and one-hot encoding to the latitude, longitude, and car type features, the feature cross can capture the city-specific relationships between car type and number of sales, as each combination of bins and car types can represent a different city and its preference for a certain car type. For example, the feature cross can learn that a city with a latitude bin of [40, 50], a longitude bin of [-80, -70] , and a car type of SUV has a higher number of sales than a city with a latitude bin of [-10, 0] , a longitude bin of [10, 20], and a car type of sedan. Therefore, using one feature obtained as an element-wise product between binned latitude, binned longitude, and one-hot encoded car type is the best option for this use case.