MLS-C01 Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

For a repository containing a large and dynamically scaling collection of images, Amazon S3 is ideal due to its scalability and versioning capabilities. Amazon S3 natively supports automatic scaling to accommodate increasing storage needs and allows versioning, which enables tracking and managing different versions of objects.

To meet the requirement of maintaining multiple, immediately accessible copies of data across AWS Regions, S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) can be enabled. CRR automatically replicates new or updated objects to a specified destination bucket in another AWS Region, ensuring low-latency access and disaster recovery. By setting up CRR with versioning enabled, the data scientist can achieve a multi-Region, scalable, and version-controlled repository in Amazon S3.

An Amazon S3 data lake is a cost-effective solution for storing and analyzing large amounts of time-based training data for a new model. Amazon S3 is a highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage service that can store any amount of data in any format. Amazon S3 also offers low-cost storage classes, such as S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA, that can reduce the storage costs for infrequently accessed data. By using hourly object prefixes, the Machine Learning Specialist can organize the data into logical partitions based on the time of ingestion. This can enable efficient data access and management, as well as support incremental updates and deletes. The Specialist can also use Amazon S3 lifecycle policies to automatically transition the data to lower-cost storage classes or delete the data after a certain period of time. This way, the Specialist can always train on the last 24 hours of the data and optimize the storage costs.

What is a data lake? - Amazon Web Services

Amazon S3 Storage Classes - Amazon Simple Storage Service

Managing your storage lifecycle - Amazon Simple Storage Service

Best Practices Design Patterns: Optimizing Amazon S3 Performance

Based on the figure provided, the data is not linearly separable. Therefore, a non-linear model such as SVM with a non-linear kernel would be the best choice. SVMs are particularly effective in high-dimensional spaces and are versatile in that they can be used for both linear and non-linear data. Additionally, SVMs have a high level of accuracy and are less prone to overfitting1

 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/svm.html

The correct combination of actions to enable the data scientist’s IAM user to invoke the SageMaker endpoint is B, C, and E, because they ensure that the IAM user has the necessary permissions, access, and syntax to query the ML model from Athena. These actions have the following benefits:

B: Including a policy statement for the IAM user that allows the sagemaker:InvokeEndpoint action grants the IAM user the permission to call the SageMaker Runtime InvokeEndpoint API, which is used to get inferences from the model hosted at the endpoint1.

C: Including an inline policy for the IAM user that allows SageMaker to read S3 objects enables the IAM user to access the data stored in S3, which is the source of the Athena queries2.

E: Including the SQL statement “USING EXTERNAL FUNCTION ml_function_name” in the Athena SQL query allows the IAM user to invoke the ML model as an external function from Athena, which is a feature that enables querying ML models from SQL statements3.

The other options are not correct or necessary, because they have the following drawbacks:

A: Attaching the AmazonAthenaFullAccess AWS managed policy to the user identity is not sufficient, because it does not grant the IAM user the permission to invoke the SageMaker endpoint, which is required to query the ML model4.

D: Including a policy statement for the IAM user that allows the IAM user to perform the sagemaker:GetRecord action is not relevant, because this action is used to retrieve a single record from a feature group, which is not the case in this scenario5.

F: Performing a user remapping in SageMaker to map the IAM user to another IAM user that is on the hosted endpoint is not applicable, because this feature is only available for multi-model endpoints, which are not used in this scenario.

1: InvokeEndpoint - Amazon SageMaker

2: Querying Data in Amazon S3 from Amazon Athena - Amazon Athena

3: Querying machine learning models from Amazon Athena using Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

4: AmazonAthenaFullAccess - AWS Identity and Access Management

5: GetRecord - Amazon SageMaker Feature Store Runtime

[Invoke a Multi-Model Endpoint - Amazon SageMaker]

 A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier is a suitable architecture for image classification tasks, as it can learn features from the images and reduce the dimensionality of the input. A linear output layer that outputs the probability that an image contains a car is appropriate for a binary classification problem, as it can produce a single scalar value between 0 and 1. A softmax output layer is more suitable for a multi-class classification problem, as it can produce a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1. A deep multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier is not as effective as a CNN for image classification, as it does not exploit the spatial structure of the images and requires a large number of parameters to process the high-dimensional input. References:

AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam Guide

AWS Training - Machine Learning on AWS

AWS Whitepaper - An Overview of Machine Learning on AWS

To leverage the NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon EC2 P3 instances, the Machine Learning Specialist needs to build the Docker container to be NVIDIA-Docker compatible. NVIDIA-Docker is a tool that enables GPU-accelerated containers to run on Docker. It automatically configures the container to access the NVIDIA drivers and libraries on the host system. The Specialist does not need to bundle the NVIDIA drivers with the Docker image, as they are already installed on the EC2 P3 instances. The Specialist does not need to organize the Docker container’s file structure to execute on GPU instances, as this is not relevant for GPU compatibility. The Specialist does not need to set the GPU flag in the Amazon SageMaker Create TrainingJob request body, as this is only required for using Elastic Inference accelerators, not EC2 P3 instances. References: NVIDIA-Docker, Using GPU-Accelerated Containers, Using Elastic Inference in Amazon SageMaker

The MAPE of the predictor could be improved by making the following changes to the CreatePredictor API call:

Set PerformAutoML to true. This will allow Amazon Forecast to automatically evaluate different algorithms and choose the one that minimizes the objective function, which is the mean of the weighted losses over the forecast types. By default, these are the p10, p50, and p90 quantile losses1. This option can help find a better algorithm than DeepAR+ for the given data.

Set PerformHPO to true. This will enable hyperparameter optimization (HPO), which is the process of finding the optimal values for the algorithm-specific parameters that affect the quality of the forecasts. HPO can improve the accuracy of the predictor by tuning the hyperparameters based on the training data2.

The other options are not likely to improve the MAPE of the predictor. Setting ForecastHorizon to 4 will reduce the number of time steps that the model predicts, which may not match the business requirement of predicting next month’s inventory. Setting ForecastFrequency to W for weekly will change the granularity of the forecasts, which may not be appropriate for the monthly data. Setting FeaturizationMethodName to filling will not have any effect, since there is no missing data in the dataset.

CreatePredictor - Amazon Forecast

HPOConfig - Amazon Forecast

The correct solution for updating the software on a SageMaker notebook instance is to stop and then restart the notebook instance. This will automatically apply the latest security and software updates provided by SageMaker1

The other options are incorrect because they either do not update the software or require unnecessary steps. For example:

Option A calls the CreateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig API operation. This operation creates a lifecycle configuration, which is a set of shell scripts that run when a notebook instance is created or started. A lifecycle configuration can be used to customize the notebook instance, such as installing additional libraries or packages. However, it does not update the software on the notebook instance2

Option B creates a new SageMaker notebook instance and mounts the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume from the original instance. This option will create a new notebook instance with the latest software, but it will also incur additional costs and require manual steps to transfer the data and settings from the original instance3

Option D calls the UpdateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig API operation. This operation updates an existing lifecycle configuration. As explained in option A, a lifecycle configuration does not update the software on the notebook instance4

1: Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instances - Amazon SageMaker

2: CreateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig - Amazon SageMaker

3: Create a Notebook Instance - Amazon SageMaker

4: UpdateNotebookInstanceLifecycleConfig - Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale. SageMaker provides a variety of tools and frameworks to support the entire machine learning workflow, from data preparation to model deployment.

One of the tools that SageMaker offers is the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK, which is a high-level library that simplifies the interaction with SageMaker APIs and services. The SageMaker Python SDK allows you to write code in Python and use popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, and more. You can use the SageMaker Python SDK to create and manage SageMaker resources such as notebook instances, training jobs, endpoints, and feature store.

If you need to continue working on a TensorFlow project using SageMaker for training without Wi-Fi access, the best approach is to download the TensorFlow Docker container used in SageMaker from GitHub to your local environment, and use the SageMaker Python SDK to test the code. This way, you can ensure that your code is compatible with the SageMaker environment and avoid any potential issues when you upload your code to SageMaker and start the training job. You can also use the same code to deploy your model to a SageMaker endpoint when you have Wi-Fi access again.

To download the TensorFlow Docker container used in SageMaker, you can visit the SageMaker Docker GitHub repository and follow the instructions to build the image locally. You can also use the SageMaker Studio Image Build CLI to automate the process of building and pushing the Docker image to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). To use the SageMaker Python SDK to test the code, you can install the SDK on your local machine by following the installation guide. You can also refer to the TensorFlow documentation for more details on how to use the SageMaker Python SDK with TensorFlow.

SageMaker Docker GitHub repository

SageMaker Studio Image Build CLI

SageMaker Python SDK installation guide

SageMaker Python SDK TensorFlow documentation

The data scientist should remove the stop words from the blog post data by using the Count Vectorizer function in the scikit-learn library, and replace the blog post data in the S3 bucket with the results of the vectorizer. This is because:

The Count Vectorizer function is a tool that can convert a collection of text documents to a matrix of token counts 1. It also enables the pre-processing of text data prior to generating the vector representation, such as removing accents, converting to lowercase, and filtering out stop words 1. By using this function, the data scientist can remove the stop words such as “a,” “an,” and “the” from the blog post data, and obtain a numerical representation of the text that can be used as input for the NTM algorithm.

The NTM algorithm is a neural network-based topic modeling technique that can learn latent topics from a corpus of documents 2. It can be used to recommend tags from blog posts by finding the most probable topics for each document, and ranking the words associated with each topic 3. However, the NTM algorithm does not perform any text pre-processing by itself, so it relies on the quality of the input data. Therefore, the data scientist should replace the blog post data in the S3 bucket with the results of the vectorizer, to ensure that the NTM algorithm does not include the stop words in the tag recommendations.

The other options are not suitable for the following reasons:

Option A is not relevant because the Amazon Comprehend entity recognition API operations are used to detect and extract named entities from text, such as people, places, organizations, dates, etc4. This is not the same as removing stop words, which are common words that do not carry much meaning or information. Moreover, removing the detected entities from the blog post data may reduce the quality and diversity of the tag recommendations, as some entities may be relevant and useful as tags.

Option B is not optimal because the SageMaker built-in principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm is used to reduce the dimensionality of a dataset by finding the most important features that capture the maximum amount of variance in the data 5. This is not the same as removing stop words, which are words that have low variance and high frequency in the data. Moreover, replacing the blog post data in the S3 bucket with the results of the PCA algorithm may not be compatible with the input format expected by the NTM algorithm, which requires a bag-of-words representation of the text 2.

Option C is not suitable because the SageMaker built-in Object Detection algorithm is used to detect and localize objects in images 6. This is not related to the task of recommending tags from blog posts, which are text documents. Moreover, using the Object Detection algorithm instead of the NTM algorithm would require a different type of input data (images instead of text), and a different type of output data (bounding boxes and labels instead of topics and words).

Neural Topic Model (NTM) Algorithm

Introduction to the Amazon SageMaker Neural Topic Model

Amazon Comprehend - Entity Recognition

sklearn.feature_extraction.text.CountVectorizer

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Algorithm

Object Detection Algorithm

K-means clustering is a machine learning technique that can be used to classify unlabeled data into different groups based on their similarity. It is an unsupervised learning method, which means it does not require any prior knowledge or labels for the data. K-means clustering works by randomly assigning data points to a number of clusters, then iteratively updating the cluster centers and reassigning the data points until the clusters are stable. The result is a partition of the data into distinct and homogeneous groups. K-means clustering can be useful for exploratory data analysis, data compression, anomaly detection, and feature extraction. References:

K-Means Clustering: A tutorial on how to use K-means clustering with Amazon SageMaker.

Unsupervised Learning: A video that explains the concept and applications of unsupervised learning.

The problem of poor performance on the test data is a sign of overfitting, which means the model has learned the training data too well and failed to generalize to new and unseen data. To correct this, the Machine Learning Specialist should consider using methods that reduce the complexity of the model and increase its ability to generalize. Some of these methods are:

Increase regularization: Regularization is a technique that adds a penalty term to the loss function of the model, which reduces the magnitude of the model weights and prevents overfitting. There are different types of regularization, such as L1, L2, and elastic net, that apply different penalties to the weights1.

Increase dropout: Dropout is a technique that randomly drops out some units or connections in the neural network during training, which reduces the co-dependency of the units and prevents overfitting. Dropout can be applied to different layers of the network, and the dropout rate can be tuned to control the amount of dropout2.

Decrease feature combinations: Feature combinations are the interactions between different input features that can be used to create new features for the model. However, too many feature combinations can increase the complexity of the model and cause overfitting. Therefore, the Specialist should decrease the number of feature combinations and select only the most relevant and informative ones for the model3.

1: Regularization for Deep Learning - Amazon SageMaker

2: Dropout - Amazon SageMaker

3: Feature Engineering - Amazon SageMaker

In a classification model, features with significantly larger scales can dominate the model training process, leading to poor performance. Normalization scales the values of continuous features to a uniform range, such as [0, 1], which prevents large-value features from disproportionately influencing the model. This is particularly beneficial for algorithms sensitive to the scale of input data, such as neural networks or distance-based algorithms.

Given that the problematic features are informative and representative of the target distribution, removing or bootstrapping these features is not advisable. Normalization will bring all features to a similar scale and improve the model's inference accuracy without losing important information.

 Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe are AWS machine learning services that can analyze and extract metadata from images, text, audio, and video content. These services are easy to use, scalable, and do not require any machine learning expertise. They can help the media company to quickly index its assets and enable rapid identification of relevant content by the research team. Using these services is the fastest route to index the assets, compared to the other options that involve human intervention, custom model development, or additional steps. References:

AWS Media Intelligence Solutions

AWS Machine Learning Services

The Best Services For Running Machine Learning Models On AWS