{"id":907,"date":"2020-08-04T01:31:37","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T01:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/?p=907"},"modified":"2021-03-27T15:01:51","modified_gmt":"2021-03-27T15:01:51","slug":"aws-certified-machine-learning-specialty-preparation-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/aws-certified-machine-learning-specialty-preparation-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"AWS Certified Machine Learning \u2013 Specialty Preparation Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">I recently took the AWS Certified Machine Learning \u2013 Specialty and wanted to share my preparation with anyone planning to certify. In my opinion, this is the second most difficult AWS exam with the most challenging being the AWS Solution Architect Professional exam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">AWS Machine Learning \u2013 Specialty Exam Details:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">There are <strong>65 questions<\/strong> on the AWS Machine Learning \u2013 Specialty exam and you are expected to complete within 3 hours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">The exam is quite unique in the sense that it is the only AWS exam that has non-related AWS questions. There are mainly three kinds of questions on the exam: general ML questions, questions on SageMaker and questions on other AWS services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong><span class=\"has-inline-color has-very-dark-gray-color\">You need hands-on ML experience as well as knowledge of Amazon SageMaker and AWS ML services to pass the exam. Having data analytics experience is a plus.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">According to the exam guide for AWS Machine Learning Specialty, the candidate should have experience developing, architecting, or running ML\/deep learning workloads on the AWS Cloud, along with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><span class=\"has-inline-color has-very-dark-gray-color\">The ability to express the intuition behind basic ML algorithms<\/span><\/li><li><span class=\"has-inline-color has-very-dark-gray-color\">&nbsp;Experience performing basic hyperparameter optimization<\/span><\/li><li><span class=\"has-inline-color has-very-dark-gray-color\">Experience with ML and deep learning frameworks<\/span><\/li><li><span class=\"has-inline-color has-very-dark-gray-color\">The ability to follow model-training best practices<\/span><\/li><li><span class=\"has-inline-color has-very-dark-gray-color\">The ability to follow deployment and operational best practices<\/span><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">The exam is made up of 4 domains. These are Data engineering, Exploratory Data Analysis, Modeling and Machine Learning Implementation and Operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-very-light-gray-background-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Data Engineering &#8211; 20%<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">The Data Engineering domain deals with data lakes, ingesting and transforming data. Services that are tested in this domain include the Kinesis family of services, S3, Database Migration Service, IoT, EMR (Spark), Glue, Athena, Step Functions and AWS Batch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Consider the below topics for this domain:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Storage options for data<\/li><li>Use cases for Kinesis Video Streams, Data Streams, Data Analytics and Kinesis Firehose and how they integrate with each other and other AWS services<\/li><li>Batch and stream processing<\/li><li>AWS services for processing and transforming data<\/li><li>Services for orchestrating data processing<\/li><li>Partitioning and data formats<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-very-light-gray-background-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Exploratory Data Analysis &#8211; 24%<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">This domain focuses on cleaning data, preparing and visualizing data. Services in this domain include Glue, EMR, QuickSight, SageMaker Ground Truth and Mechanical Turk,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Consider the below topics for this domain:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Techniques for dealing with missing values and imputing them<\/li><li>Techniques for numerical, text and image feature engineering<\/li><li>Dataset formats and modes supported by different algorithms<\/li><li>Knowledge of tools for data preparation<\/li><li>Probability distribution and their application<\/li><li>Knowledge of scaling, normalizing, binning and transforming features<\/li><li>One hot-encoding and other encoding types<\/li><li>Types of visualizations for analyzing data to make informed decisions<\/li><li>How to perform feature selection<\/li><li>Options available for labeling data<\/li><li>Dealing with Outliers and unbalanced data<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-very-light-gray-background-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Modelling &#8211; 36%<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">This domain has the most questions on the exam as well as some general ML concepts. It deals with identifying ML solutions for business problems, training models, hyperparameter optimization and evaluating machine learning models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Consider the below topics for this domain:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Identify use cases that are appropriate for ML and those that are not<\/li><li>Know the difference between Machine Learning and Deep Learning<\/li><li>Knowledge of the various types of ML and DL<\/li><li>Machine Learning Frameworks and algorithms<\/li><li>Automatic Model Tuning in SageMaker<\/li><li>Built-in SageMaker Algorithms and their use cases<\/li><li>Dataset formats supported by algorithms<\/li><li>L1 and L2 Regularization<\/li><li>Confusion Matrix,Recall,Precision,F1 score, ROC and AUC<\/li><li>Knowledge of SageMaker architecture and integrations<\/li><li>Hyperparameters and objective metrics for SageMaker algorithms<\/li><li>Select appropriate model for a given use case<\/li><li>How to use SageMaker to build and train ML models<\/li><li>How to use your own model for training and inference<\/li><li>Instance types for training and inference<\/li><li>Docker folder structure required for SageMaker<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-very-light-gray-background-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Machine Learning Implementation &amp; Operations &#8211; 20%<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">The final domain tests the candidate on deploying models and identifying AWS AI services for business use cases. It also covers monitoring and security of ML solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Consider the below topics for this domain:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>&nbsp;AWS AI services including Rekognition, Textract, Translate, Polly, Lex etc.<\/li><li>How to secure your notebook instances<\/li><li>Deploying machine learning models and solutions<\/li><li>Implement monitoring for your ML solutions<\/li><li>Types of SageMaker endpoints<\/li><li>Performing inference at the edge(Neo and Greengrass)<\/li><li>Knowledge of inference endpoints and production variants<\/li><li>SageMaker instance types and managed spot training<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"has-light-green-cyan-background-color has-background wp-block-heading\">Conclusion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">I have tried to list as many topics as possible but this exam is non-exhausted. I suggest you access your skills and spend more time on areas you identify as your weakness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\">My target score for this exam was 950 but I scored 881. Most importantly, I passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-light-green-cyan-background-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Resources Used<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Preparation Courses:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/linuxacademy.com\/cp\/modules\/view\/id\/340\" target=\"_blank\">Linux Academy<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.udemy.com\/course\/aws-machine-learning\/\" target=\"_blank\">Frank Kane &amp; Stephane Maarek &#8211; Udemy<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/learn.acloud.guru\/course\/aws-certified-machine-learning-specialty\/dashboard\" target=\"_blank\">ACloudGuru<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Practice Test:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.whizlabs.com\/learn\/course\/aws-mls-practice-tests\/\" target=\"_blank\">Whizlabs<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>AWS Training &amp; Certification Digital courses<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/eLearning?id=26598\" target=\"_blank\">The Elements of Data Science<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/eLearning?id=42183\" target=\"_blank\">Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Machine Learning \u2013 Specialty<\/a>&nbsp;<\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/Curriculum?id=27243\" target=\"_blank\">Developing Machine Learning Applications<\/a>&nbsp;<\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/eLearning?id=27200\" target=\"_blank\">Process Model: CRISP-DM on the AWS Stack<\/a>&nbsp;<\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/Curriculum?id=27153\" target=\"_blank\">Speaking Of: Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing (NLP)<\/a>&nbsp;<\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/Video?id=27225\" target=\"_blank\">Build a Text Classification Model with AWS Glue and Amazon SageMaker<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/Video?id=27230\" target=\"_blank\">Deep Dive on Amazon Rekognition: Building Computer Visions Based Smart Applications<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aws.training\/Details\/eLearning?id=20294\" target=\"_blank\">Machine Learning Terminology and Process<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>AWS Whitepapers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/d1.awsstatic.com\/whitepapers\/Deep_Learning_on_AWS.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Deep Learning on AWS<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/d1.awsstatic.com\/whitepapers\/aws-power-ml-at-scale.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Power Machine Learning at scale &#8211; Mapping Parallelized Modeling-to-HPC Infrastructure on AWS<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\"><strong>Other Resources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/learning.oreilly.com\/library\/view\/evaluating-machine-learning\/9781492048756\/\" target=\"_blank\">Evaluating Machine Learning Models by Alice Zheng<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\/quick-start-to-multi-gpu-deep-learning-on-aws-sagemaker-using-tf-distribute-9ee08bc9612b\" target=\"_blank\">Towards Data Science &#8211; Quick Start to Multi GPU Deep Learning on AWS SageMaker Using TF Distribute<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\/various-ways-to-evaluate-a-machine-learning-models-performance-230449055f15\" target=\"_blank\">Towards Data Science &#8211; Various Ways To Evaluate a Machine Learning Model&#8217;s Performance<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\/brewing-up-custom-ml-models-on-aws-sagemaker-e09b64627722\" target=\"_blank\">Towards Data Science &#8211; Brewing up custom ML models on AWS SageMaker<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-vivid-cyan-blue-color has-text-color\" style=\"font-size:18px\"><strong>Have questions? Participate in AWS discussions on our Forums. <a href=\"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/forums\/\">Click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\" style=\"font-size:17px\">Author: Emmanuel Koomson is a Product Owner, Solution Architect, <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">13X AWS Certified<\/span><\/strong> and a life long learner. You can connect with him on <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/opanion\/\" target=\"_blank\">LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-very-dark-gray-color has-text-color\" style=\"font-size:17px\">More from the author: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/how-to-prepare-for-aws-certified-database-specialty\/\" target=\"_blank\">How to Prepare for AWS Certified Database Specialty<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/aws-certified-data-analytics-specialty-preparation-guide\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">How to Prepare for AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AWS Certified Machine Learning \u2013 Specialty Preparation Guide <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":910,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,114],"tags":[18,8,5,6,115,10],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aws","category-aws-certified-machine-learning","tag-aws","tag-aws-certification","tag-aws-certifications","tag-aws-cloud-certifications","tag-aws-machine-learning","tag-prepare-for-aws-certification"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1949,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions\/1949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reviewnprep.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}