A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Koos van Strien wants to use the xgboost model in Azure ML Studio:
Because the high-level path of bringing trained R models from the local R environment towards the cloud Azure ML is almost identical to the Python one I showed two weeks ago, I use the same four steps to guide you through the process:
Export the trained model
Zip the exported files
Upload to the Azure ML environment
Embed in your Azure ML solution
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedKoos van Strien moves from Python to R to run an xgboost algorithm:
Note that the parameters of xgboost used here fall in three categories:
General parameters
- nthread (number of threads used, here 8 = the number of cores in my laptop)
Booster parameters
- max.depth (of tree)
- eta
Learning task parameters
- objective: type of learning task (softmax for multiclass classification)
- num_class: needed for the “softmax” algorithm: how many classes to predict?
Command Line Parameters
nround: number of rounds for boosting
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedKoos van Strien wants to bring a trained Python model into Azure ML:
The path of bringing a trained model from the local Python/Anaconda environment towards cloud Azure ML is globally as follows:
Export the trained model
Zip the exported files
Upload to the Azure ML environment
Embed in your Azure ML solution
Click through to see the details. Koos did a great job making it look easy.
Comments closedKoos van Strien “graduates” from Azure ML into Python:
Python is often used in conjunction with the scikit-learn collection of libraries. The most important libraries used for ML in Python are grouped inside a distribution called Anaconda. This is the distribution that’s also used inside Azure ML1. Besides Python and scikit-learn, Anaconda contains all kinds of Data Science-oriented packages. It’s a good idea to install Anaconda as a distribution and use Jupyter (formerly IPython) as development environment: Anaconda gives you almost the same environment on your local machine as your code will run in once in Azure ML. Jupyter gives you a nice way to keep code (in Python) and write / document (in Markdown) together.
Anaconda can be downloaded from https://www.continuum.io/downloads.
If you’re going down this path, Anaconda is absolutely a great choice.
Comments closedWilliam Vorhies discusses a new technical paper on Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations:
What the model actually used for classification were these: ‘posting’, ‘host’, ‘NNTP’, ‘EDU’, ‘have’, ‘there’. These are meaningless artifacts that appear in both the training and test sets and have nothing to do with the topic except that, for example, the word “posting” (part of the email header) appears in 21.6% of the examples in the training set but only two times in the class “Christianity.”
Is this model going to generalize? Absolutely not.
An Example from Image Processing
In this example using Google’s Inception NN on arbitrary images the objective was to correctly classify “tree frogs”. The classifier was correct in about 54% of cases but also interpreted the image as a pool table (7%) and a balloon (5%).
Looks like an interesting paper. Click through for a link to the paper.
Comments closedKoos van Strien shows how to tune hyperparameters using Azure ML:
Today, we’ll focus on tuning the model’s properties. We won’t discuss the details of all properties (you can easily look that up in the docs), instead we’ll look at how to test for different parameter combinations insize Azure ML Studio.
As soon as you click on an untrained model inside your experiment, you’ll be presented with some parameters – or, in ML parlance, hyperparameters – you can tweak.
Parameter tuning is pretty easy using Azure ML.
Comments closedKoos van Strien discusses training data sets and cross-validating results:
When choosing a train and testset, you’ll implicitly introduce a new bias: it could be that the model you just trained predicts well for this particular testset, when trained for this particular trainset. To reduce this bias, you could “cross-validate” your results.
Cross-validation (often abbreviated as just “cv”) splits the dataset into n folds. Each fold is used once as a testset, using all other folds together as a training set. So in our pizza example with 100 records, with 5 folds we will have 5 test runs:
This isn’t Azure ML-specific, and is good reading.
Comments closedKoos van Strien gives a quick overview of Azure ML:
Before I started, I was already quite comfortable programming Python and did some R programming in the past. This turned out pretty handy, though not really needed to start off with – because starting with Azure ML, the data flow can be created much like BI specialists are used to in SSIS.
A good place to start for me was the Tutorial competition (Iris Petal Competition). It provides you with a pre-filled workspace with everything in place to train and test your first ML model:
I’d like to see Azure ML get more traction; I’m not optimistic that it will.
Comments closedGinger Grant shows how to call an Azure Machine Learning web service from within Azure Data Factory:
The Linked Service for ML is going to need some information from the Web Service, the URL and the API key. Chances are neither of these have been committed to memory, instead open up Azure ML, go to Web Service and copy them. For the URL, look under the API Help Pagegrid, there are two options, Request/Response and Batch Execution. Clicking on Batch Execution loads a new page Batch Execution API Document. The URL can be found under Request URI. When copying the URL, you do not need to include any text after the word “jobs”. The rest of the URL, “?api-version=2.0”. Copying the entire URL will cause an error. Going back to the web Services page, The API Key appears on the dashboard section of Azure ML and there is a convenient button for copying it. Using these two pieces of information, it is now possible to create the Data Factory Linked Service to make the connection to the web service, which here I called AzureMLLinkedService
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedUjjwal Ratan uses patient readmission data to demonstrate Amazon Machine Learning:
The Amazon ML endpoint created earlier can be invoked using an API call. This is very handy for building an application for end users who can interact with the ML model in real time.
Create a similar application and host it as a static website on Amazon S3. This feature of S3 allows you to host websites without any web servers and takes away the complexities of scaling hardware based on traffic routed to your application. The following is a screenshot from the application:
I think that Azure ML is still ahead of Amazon’s ML solution, but I’m happy to see the competition.
Comments closed