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

Amazon Redshift ML enables in-database machine learning model creation and predictions, allowing data scientists to leverage Redshift for model training without needing to export data.

To create and run a model for customer churn prediction in Amazon Redshift ML:

Define the feature variables and target variable: Identify the columns to use as features (predictors) and the target variable (outcome) for the churn prediction model.

Create the model: Write a CREATE MODEL SQL statement, which trains the model using Amazon Redshift’s integration with Amazon SageMaker and stores the model directly in Redshift.

Run predictions: Use the SQL PREDICT function to generate predictions on new data directly within Redshift.

Options B, D, and E are not required as Redshift ML handles model creation and prediction without manual data export to Amazon S3 or additional Spectrum integration.

 The best way to securely access data stored in a specific Amazon S3 bucket from an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance is to attach a policy to the IAM role associated with the notebook that allows GetObject, PutObject, and ListBucket operations to the specific S3 bucket. This way, the notebook can use the AWS SDK or CLI to access the S3 bucket without exposing any credentials or requiring any additional configuration. This is also the recommended approach by AWS for granting access to S3 from SageMaker. References:

Amazon SageMaker Roles

Accessing Amazon S3 from a SageMaker Notebook Instance

The best approaches to decrease the training time of the model are C and D, because they can improve the computational efficiency and parallelization of the training process. These approaches have the following benefits:

C: Replacing CPU-based EC2 instances with GPU-based EC2 instances can speed up the training of the DeepAR algorithm, as it can leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs to perform matrix operations and gradient computations faster than CPUs12. The DeepAR algorithm supports GPU-based EC2 instances such as ml.p2 and ml.p33.

D: Using multiple training instances can also reduce the training time of the DeepAR algorithm, as it can distribute the workload across multiple nodes and perform data parallelism4. The DeepAR algorithm supports distributed training with multiple CPU-based or GPU-based EC2 instances3.

The other options are not effective or relevant, because they have the following drawbacks:

A: Replacing On-Demand Instances with Spot Instances can reduce the cost of the training, but not necessarily the time, as Spot Instances are subject to interruption and availability5. Moreover, the DeepAR algorithm does not support checkpointing, which means that the training cannot resume from the last saved state if the Spot Instance is terminated3.

B: Configuring model auto scaling dynamically to adjust the number of instances automatically is not applicable, as this feature is only available for inference endpoints, not for training jobs6.

E: Using a pre-trained version of the model and running incremental training is not possible, as the DeepAR algorithm does not support incremental training or transfer learning3. The DeepAR algorithm requires a full retraining of the model whenever new data is added or the hyperparameters are changed7.

1: GPU vs CPU: What Matters Most for Machine Learning? | by Louis (What’s AI) Bouchard | Towards Data Science

2: How GPUs Accelerate Machine Learning Training | NVIDIA Developer Blog

3: DeepAR Forecasting Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

4: Distributed Training - Amazon SageMaker

5: Managed Spot Training - Amazon SageMaker

6: Automatic Scaling - Amazon SageMaker

7: How the DeepAR Algorithm Works - Amazon SageMaker

When an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance needs to access encrypted data in Amazon S3, the ML specialist must ensure that both Amazon S3 access permissions and AWS Key Management Service (KMS) decryption permissions are properly configured. The dataset in this scenario is stored with server-side encryption using an AWS KMS key (SSE-KMS), so the following steps are necessary:

S3 Read Permissions: Attach an IAM role to the SageMaker notebook instance with permissions that allow the s3:GetObject action for the specific S3 bucket storing the data. This will allow the notebook instance to read data from Amazon S3.

KMS Key Policy Permissions: Grant permissions in the KMS key policy to the IAM role assigned to the SageMaker notebook instance. This allows SageMaker to use the KMS key to decrypt data in the S3 bucket.

These steps ensure the SageMaker notebook instance can access the encrypted data stored in S3. The AWS documentation emphasizes that to access SSE-KMS encrypted data, the SageMaker notebook requires appropriate permissions in both the S3 bucket policy and the KMS key policy, making Option C the correct and secure approach.

The problem described in the question is a case of underfitting, where the neural network model performs poorly on both the training and validation sets. This means that the model has not learned the features of the data well enough and has high bias. To solve this issue, the machine learning specialist should consider the following change:

Add more data to the training set and retrain the model using transfer learning to reduce the bias: Adding more data to the training set can help the model learn more patterns and variations in the data and improve its performance. Transfer learning can also help the model leverage the knowledge from the pre-trained network and adapt it to the new data. This can reduce the bias and increase the accuracy of the model.

Transfer learning for TensorFlow image classification models in Amazon SageMaker

Transfer learning for custom labels using a TensorFlow container and “bring your own algorithm” in Amazon SageMaker

Machine Learning Concepts - AWS Training and Certification

Principal component analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that attempts to reduce the dimensionality (number of features) within a dataset while still retaining as much information as possible. This is done by finding a new set of features called components, which are composites of the original features that are uncorrelated with one another. They are also constrained so that the first component accounts for the largest possible variability in the data, the second component the second most variability, and so on. By using PCA, the impact of having a large number of features that are highly correlated with each other can be reduced, as the new feature space will have fewer dimensions and less redundancy. This can make the linear models more stable and less prone to overfitting. References:

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Algorithm - Amazon SageMaker

Perform a large-scale principal component analysis faster using Amazon SageMaker | AWS Machine Learning Blog

Machine Learning- Prinicipal Component Analysis | i2tutorials

 To configure the notebook instance placement to meet the requirements, the Data Science team should associate the Amazon SageMaker notebook with a private subnet in a VPC. A VPC is a virtual network that is logically isolated from other networks in AWS. A private subnet is a subnet that has no internet gateway attached to it, and therefore cannot communicate with the internet. By placing the notebook instance in a private subnet, the team can ensure that it stays within a secured VPC with no internet access.

However, to access data stored in Amazon S3 buckets and other AWS services, the team needs to ensure that the VPC has S3 VPC endpoints and Amazon SageMaker VPC endpoints attached to it. A VPC endpoint is a gateway that enables private connections between the VPC and supported AWS services. A VPC endpoint does not require an internet gateway, a NAT device, or a VPN connection, and ensures that the traffic between the VPC and the AWS service does not leave the AWS network. By using VPC endpoints, the team can access Amazon S3 and Amazon SageMaker from the notebook instance without compromising data privacy or security.

What Is Amazon VPC? - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Subnet Routing - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

VPC Endpoints - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

The data scientist should use Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to sort the data into two groups named “enrolled” or “not enrolled.” This will create a labeled dataset that can be used for supervised learning. The data scientist should then use a classification algorithm to run predictions on the test data. A classification algorithm is a suitable choice for predicting a binary outcome, such as enrollment status, based on the input features, such as academic performance. A classification algorithm will output a probability for each class label and assign the most likely label to each observation.

Use Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to Label Data

Classification Algorithm in Machine Learning

Amazon SageMaker script mode is a feature that allows users to use training scripts similar to those they would use outside SageMaker with SageMaker’s prebuilt containers for various frameworks such as TensorFlow. Script mode supports reading data from Amazon S3 buckets without requiring any changes to the training script. Therefore, option B is the best method of providing training data to Amazon SageMaker that would meet the business requirements with the least development overhead.

Option A is incorrect because using a local path of the data would not be scalable or reliable, as it would depend on the availability and capacity of the local storage. Moreover, using a local path of the data would not leverage the benefits of Amazon S3, such as durability, security, and performance. Option C is incorrect because rewriting the train.py script to convert TFRecords to protobuf would require additional development effort and complexity, as well as introduce potential errors and inconsistencies in the data format. Option D is incorrect because preparing the data in the format accepted by Amazon SageMaker would also require additional development effort and complexity, as well as involve using additional services such as AWS Glue or AWS Lambda, which would increase the cost and maintenance of the solution.

Bring your own model with Amazon SageMaker script mode

GitHub - aws-samples/amazon-sagemaker-script-mode

Deep Dive on TensorFlow training with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon S3

amazon-sagemaker-script-mode/generate_cifar10_tfrecords.py at master

Amazon SageMaker script mode allows users to bring custom training scripts (such as train.py) without needing extensive modifications for specific data formats like TFRecord. By storing the TFRecord data in an Amazon S3 bucket and pointing the SageMaker training job to this bucket, the model can directly access the data, allowing the ML specialist to train the model without additional reformatting or data processing steps.

This approach minimizes development overhead and leverages SageMaker's built-in support for custom training scripts and S3 integration, making it the most efficient choice.

Amazon Kinesis and AWS Data Pipeline are two services that can feed data to the Amazon EMR MapReduce jobs. Amazon Kinesis is a service that can ingest, process, and analyze streaming data in real time. Amazon Kinesis can be integrated with Amazon EMR to run MapReduce jobs on streaming data sources, such as web logs, social media, IoT devices, and clickstreams. Amazon Kinesis can handle data that needs to be processed in near-real time, such as for anomaly detection, fraud detection, or dashboarding. AWS Data Pipeline is a service that can orchestrate and automate data movement and transformation across various AWS services and on-premises data sources. AWS Data Pipeline can be integrated with Amazon EMR to run MapReduce jobs on batch data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Redshift. AWS Data Pipeline can handle data that can be moved hourly, such as for data warehousing, reporting, or machine learning.

AWSDMS is not a valid service name. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that can migrate data from various sources to various targets, but it does not support streaming data or MapReduce jobs.

Amazon Athena is a service that can query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, but it does not feed data to Amazon EMR or run MapReduce jobs.

Amazon ES is a service that provides a fully managed Elasticsearch cluster, which can be used for search, analytics, and visualization, but it does not feed data to Amazon EMR or run MapReduce jobs. References:

Using Amazon Kinesis with Amazon EMR - Amazon EMR

AWS Data Pipeline - Amazon Web Services

Using AWS Data Pipeline to Run Amazon EMR Jobs - AWS Data Pipeline

To develop a daily ETL workflow containing multiple ETL jobs that can start as soon as data is uploaded to Amazon S3, the best configuration is to use AWS Lambda to trigger an AWS Step Functions workflow to wait for dataset uploads to complete in Amazon S3. Use AWS Glue to join the datasets. Use an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to send an SNS notification to the Administrator in the case of a failure.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can use Lambda to create functions that respond to events such as data uploads to Amazon S3. You can also use Lambda to invoke other AWS services such as AWS Step Functions and AWS Glue.

AWS Step Functions is a service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. You can use Step Functions to create a state machine that defines the sequence and logic of your ETL workflow. You can also use Step Functions to handle errors and retries, and to monitor the execution status of your workflow.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics. You can use Glue to create and run ETL jobs that can join data from multiple sources in Amazon S3. You can also use Glue to catalog your data and make it searchable and queryable.

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors your AWS resources and applications. You can use CloudWatch to create alarms that trigger actions when a metric or a log event meets a specified threshold. You can also use CloudWatch to send notifications to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics, which can then deliver the notifications to subscribers such as email addresses or phone numbers.

Therefore, by using these services together, you can achieve the following benefits:

You can start the ETL workflow as soon as data is uploaded to Amazon S3 by using Lambda functions to trigger Step Functions workflows.

You can wait for all the datasets to be available in Amazon S3 by using Step Functions to poll the S3 buckets and check the data completeness.

You can join the datasets with terabyte-sized datasets in Amazon S3 by using Glue ETL jobs that can scale and parallelize the data processing.

You can store the results of joining datasets in Amazon S3 by using Glue ETL jobs to write the output to S3 buckets.

You can send a notification to the Administrator if one of the jobs fails by using CloudWatch alarms to monitor the Step Functions or Glue metrics and send SNS notifications in case of a failure.

The task involves periodic inference (hourly batches of telemetry data) that can be processed in bulk, with the total processing time under 5 minutes. The most cost-effective solution for this batch prediction scenario is SageMaker Batch Transform, as it avoids the need for always-on endpoints.

“Use Batch Transform when you: … Don’t need a persistent endpoint and want to process batches of data at once. This is typically the most cost-efficient way to process large volumes of input data periodically.”

Since the use case doesn't require low latency or asynchronous real-time response, and processing takes only minutes, Batch Transform is the optimal fit.

A sequential split is a method of splitting data into training and evaluation datasets while preserving the order of the data records. This method is useful when the data has a temporal or sequential structure, and the order of the data matters for the prediction task. For example, if the data contains sales data for different months or years, and the goal is to predict the sales for the next month or year, a sequential split can ensure that the training data comes from the earlier period and the evaluation data comes from the later period. This can help avoid data leakage, which occurs when the training data contains information from the future that is not available at the time of prediction. A sequential split can also help evaluate the model performance on the most recent data, which may be more relevant and representative of the future data.

In this question, Example Corp has sequential sales data from the past 15 years and wants to use Amazon ML to predict the sales for this year’s upcoming annual sale event. A sequential split is the most appropriate method for splitting the data, as it can preserve the order of the data and prevent data leakage. For example, Example Corp can use the data from the first 14 years as the training dataset, and the data from the last year as the evaluation dataset. This way, the model can learn from the historical data and be tested on the most recent data.

Amazon ML provides an option to split the data sequentially when creating the training and evaluation datasources. To use this option, Example Corp can specify the percentage of the data to use for training and evaluation, and Amazon ML will use the first part of the data for training and the remaining part of the data for evaluation. For more information, see Splitting Your Data - Amazon Machine Learning.

The problem involves assigning multiple related, non-mutually exclusive categories (like "yogurt", "snack", and "dairy product") to customer comments referencing specific products. Amazon Comprehend provides custom classification capabilities, and in this case, the appropriate mode is multi-label, not multi-class.

“Use multi-label mode when each document can belong to more than one class. This is appropriate for situations where the categories are not mutually exclusive.”

This allows a single document to be tagged with several relevant labels simultaneously, which is precisely the use case described.

In this scenario, Kinesis Data Streams efficiently ingests real-time event data, while Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink (formerly Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics) is ideal for transforming and analyzing data in a continuous stream. Apache Flink allows processing of time-based windows, such as the 10-minute sliding window required here, with low operational overhead.

This combination provides an effective solution for low-latency data processing and transformation, meeting the requirements for preparing data for inference with minimal setup and serverless scalability.

Amazon SageMaker Experiments is a service that helps track, compare, and evaluate different iterations of ML models. It can be used to capture key parameters such as the number of features and the sample count from a PySpark script that runs as a SageMaker processing job. A SageMaker processing job is a flexible and scalable way to run data processing workloads on AWS, such as feature engineering, data validation, model evaluation, and model interpretation.

Amazon SageMaker Experiments

Process Data and Evaluate Models

Data augmentation is a technique to increase the size and diversity of the training data by applying random transformations such as rotation, translation, scaling, flipping, etc. This can help reduce overfitting and improve the generalization of the model. Data augmentation can be done using the Amazon SageMaker image classification algorithm, which supports various augmentation options such as horizontal_flip, vertical_flip, rotate, brightness, contrast, etc1

The Amazon SageMaker k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm is a supervised learning algorithm that can be used to label unlabeled data based on the similarity to the labeled data. The k-NN algorithm assigns a label to an unlabeled instance by finding the k closest labeled instances in the feature space and taking a majority vote among their labels. This can help increase the size and diversity of the training data and reduce overfitting. The k-NN algorithm can be used with the Amazon SageMaker image classification algorithm by extracting features from the images using a pre-trained model and then applying the k-NN algorithm on the feature vectors2

Using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to label the unlabeled images is not a good option because it is a manual and costly process that requires human annotators. Moreover, it does not address the issue of overfitting on the existing labeled data.

Using image preprocessing to transform the images into grayscale images is not a good option because it reduces the amount of information and variation in the images, which can degrade the performance of the model. Moreover, it does not address the issue of overfitting on the existing labeled data.

Replacing the activation of the last layer with a sigmoid is not a good option because it is not suitable for a multi-class classification problem. A sigmoid activation function outputs a value between 0 and 1, which can be interpreted as a probability of belonging to a single class. However, for a multi-class classification problem, the output should be a vector of probabilities that sum up to 1, which can be achieved by using a softmax activation function.

The best storage scheme for this scenario is to store datasets as files in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a scalable, cost-effective, and durable object storage service that can store any amount and type of data. Amazon S3 also supports querying data using SQL with Amazon Athena, a serverless interactive query service that can analyze data directly in S3. This way, the Data Science team can easily explore and analyze their datasets without having to load them into a database or a compute instance.

The other options are not as suitable for this scenario because:

Storing datasets as files in an Amazon EBS volume attached to an Amazon EC2 instance would limit the scalability and availability of the data, as EBS volumes are only accessible within a single availability zone and have a maximum size of 16 TiB. Also, EBS volumes are more expensive than S3 buckets and require provisioning and managing EC2 instances.

Storing datasets as tables in a multi-node Amazon Redshift cluster would incur higher costs and complexity than using S3 and Athena. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse service that is optimized for analytical queries over structured or semi-structured data. However, it requires setting up and maintaining a cluster of nodes, loading data into tables, and choosing the right distribution and sort keys for optimal performance. Moreover, Amazon Redshift charges for both storage and compute, while S3 and Athena only charge for the amount of data stored and scanned, respectively.

Storing datasets as global tables in Amazon DynamoDB would not be feasible for large amounts of data, as DynamoDB is a key-value and document database service that is designed for fast and consistent performance at any scale. However, DynamoDB has a limit of 400 KB per item and 25 GB per partition key value, which may not be enough for storing large datasets. Also, DynamoDB does not support SQL queries natively, and would require using a service like Amazon EMR or AWS Glue to run SQL queries over DynamoDB data.

Amazon S3 - Cloud Object Storage

Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3

Amazon EBS - Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Redshift – Data Warehouse Solution - AWS

Amazon DynamoDB – NoSQL Cloud Database Service