What is Azure Machine Learning studio?

Training and deploying an effective machine learning model involves a lot of work, much of
it time-consuming and resource-intensive. Azure Machine Learning is a cloud-based service
that helps simplify some of the tasks it takes to prepare data, train a model, and deploy a
predictive service.
Most importantly, Azure Machine Learning helps data scientists increase their efficiency by
automating many of the time-consuming tasks associated with training models; and it enables
them to use cloud-based compute resources that scale effectively to handle large volumes of
data while incurring costs only when actually used.

Azure Machine Learning workspace

To use Azure Machine Learning, you first create a workspace resource in your Azure
subscription. You can then use this workspace to manage data, compute resources, code,
models, and other artifacts related to your machine learning workloads.
After you have created an Azure Machine Learning workspace, you can develop solutions
with the Azure machine learning service either with developer tools or the Azure Machine
Learning studio web portal.

Azure Machine Learning studio

Azure Machine Learning studio is a web portal for machine learning solutions in Azure. It
includes a wide range of features and capabilities that help data scientists prepare data, train
models, publish predictive services, and monitor their usage. To begin using the web portal,
you need to assign the workspace you created in the Azure portal to Azure Machine Learning
studio.
Azure Machine Learning compute
At its core, Azure Machine Learning is a service for training and managing machine learning
models, for which you need compute on which to run the training process.
Compute targets are cloud-based resources on which you can run model training and data
exploration processes.
In Azure Machine Learning studio, you can manage the compute targets for your data science
activities.

There are four kinds of compute resource you can create:

 Compute Instances: Development workstations that data scientists can use to work with
data and models.
 Compute Clusters: Scalable clusters of virtual machines for on-demand processing of
experiment code.
 Inference Clusters: Deployment targets for predictive services that use your trained models.
 Attached Compute: Links to existing Azure compute resources, such as Virtual Machines
or Azure Databricks clusters.

What is Azure Automated Machine Learning?

 Azure Machine Learning includes an automated machine learning capability that

automatically tries multiple pre-processing techniques and model-training algorithms in
parallel.
 These automated capabilities use the power of cloud compute to find the best performing
supervised machine learning model for your data.
Automated machine learning allows you to train models without extensive data science or
programming knowledge.
 For people with a data science and programming background, it provides a way to save
time and resources by automating algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning.
 You can create an automated machine learning job in Azure Machine Learning studio.
 In Azure Machine Learning, operations that you run are called jobs. You can configure
multiple settings for your job before starting an automated machine learning run.
 The run configuration provides the information needed to specify your training script,
compute target, and Azure MLenvironment in your run configuration and run a training
job.

Understand the AutoML process

You can think of the steps in a machine learning process as:
1. Prepare data: Identify the features and label in a dataset. Pre-process, or clean and
transform, the data as needed.
2. Train model: Split the data into two groups, a training and a validation set. Train a
machine learning model using the training data set. Test the machine learning model for
performance using the validation data set.
3. Evaluate performance: Compare how close the model's predictions are to the known
labels.
4. Deploy a predictive service: After you train a machine learning model, you can deploy
the model as an application on a server or device so that others can use it.

Example:
PREDICT AUTOMOBILE PRICES ON AZURE ML STUDIO

Creating a New Project:

Step 1: Go to this https://studio.azureml.net/ and Sign up for a free account if you do not
have a subscription. This free plan is perfect for beginners who are experimenting with the
platform.

Step 2: After log-in is complete, open the ‘Projects’ tab located in the pane on the left.
You can now see all the projects created by the user over the past. If you are a new user,
this pane would remain empty. Hit the ‘New’ button on the bottom-left corner to create a
new project.
Step 3: Select ‘Empty Project’ from the pane that appears. A dialog box would pop open,
asking for a name and a description for your project. Give your project an appropriate name
like ‘Automobile Price Prediction’ and add an optional description. Hit the ‘tick’ button
on the bottom-right corner of the dialog box.
Step 4: Click on the ‘Add Assets’ link. Once you are directed to the ‘Change Project
Configuration’ window, move the ‘datasets’ and ‘experiments’ from the ‘All Assets’ pane
to the ‘Project Assets’ pane by clicking on the right arrowhead. Both these assets are
sufficient for this project. Click on the ‘tick’ button on the bottom-right corner of the page.

Your new project is ready! Also, it is not necessary to create a new project to work with the
experiments. You could even start working on a new experiment by following the steps
given below without creating a new project at all. Although, they could simplify
experiment organization by a tad bit.

Creating a New Experiment:

Follow the below steps to create a new experiment:

Step 1: Hit the ‘Experiments’ tab on the left pane. You can now see all the experiments
done by the user in the past. If you are a new user, this ‘My experiments’ pane would
remain empty. To create a new experiment, hit the ‘New’ button on the bottom-left corner
of the page.

Step 2: Now, select the ‘Blank Experiment’ option. You can also opt for various pre-
defined templates provided by ML Studio.
A new blank experiment has been created! The canvas of this blank experiment appears.
Now, you can simply look for items in the left pane, drag them to the canvas and drop them
wherever they are required. To establish a proper workflow, the items need to be connected
with the previous and forthcoming items. These relationships can be easily established by
dragging the mouse pointer and releasing it upon reaching the designated item.
Now, rename your experiment from ‘Experiment created on to a valid name. Add an
appropriate summary and description.

Now, we shall begin with the main process of building, training, and testing the models.
 ML Studio provides numerous sample datasets for beginners. On the ‘search
experiment items’ pane on the left, hit the ‘Saved Datasets’ button and scrounge for
the Automobile Price dataset under ‘Samples’. Once you find it, drag it and drop it at
the center of the canvas. You can upload your own dataset also.

 Under ‘search experiment items’, look for ‘select columns in dataset’. This module
enables the users to include or exclude certain columns in a dataset. Drag it and drop it
below the dataset module. In the ‘Properties’ pane on the right, select the ‘Launch
column selector. Now, we want to exclude the ‘Normalized losses’ column because it
has numerous missing values. Select ‘exclude’ -> ‘column name’ -> ‘Normalized
Losses’. Hit the ‘tick’ button on the bottom-right corner. The desired column shall be
excluded from the model.
Now, link the Automobile price data module to the ‘Select columns in Dataset’ module by
simply dragging an arrowhead from the first module and dropping it onto the 2nd module.

 From the ‘search experiment items’ pane, access the ‘clean missing data’ module.
Drag it and drop it below the previous module. On the ‘properties’ pane on the right,
change the cleaning mode to ‘remove entire row’. This means that if a particular row
 has missing values, the row would be deleted. You can also alternatively choose to
substitute the missing values with various methods of central tendency depending on the
ultimate goal. Link it to the previous module.

 Select the ‘select columns in dataset’ module from the left-most pane again and drop it
onto the canvas. This time, we shall select the columns we want to include in the
training model. So, hit the ‘launch column selector’ button on the ‘Properties’ pane
and choose the columns of your choice.

Begin with No columns and hit the ‘tick’ button on the bottom-right corner. after selection.
Link this module to the first port of the previous module.
 Now, we need to split the dataset into the training part and the testing part. So, drag
the ‘Split the data’ module from the ‘search experiment items’ pane and drop it onto
the canvas. In the ‘Properties’ pane, change the ‘fraction of rows in the first output
dataset’ value to 0.7 and check the ‘randomized split’ box. This renders 70% of data
available for training randomly and the remaining to be used for testing. Link it to the
previous module.

 We can now select the Machine Learning algorithm for training. On the ‘search
experiment items’ pane, look for ‘Linear Regression’ and drop it on the canvas. Also,
 drop the ‘Train Model’ module onto the canvas. Link the 1st port of the ‘split
data’ module to the 2nd port of the ‘Train model’ module and the ‘Linear
Regression’ module to the 1st port of the ‘Train Model’ module.

 Hit the ‘Launch Column Selector’ button on the right-most pane and choose the
column you want to predict. Hit the ‘tick’ button on the bottom-right corner of the page.
 Drop the ‘Score Model’ module from the ‘search experiment items’ pane onto the
canvas. Connect the ‘Train Model’ module to the 1st port of the ‘Score Model’ and the
2nd port of the ‘Split Data’ module to the 2nd port of the ‘Score Model’ module. ML
Studio suggests the port one should connect the corresponding links with.

 Finally, drop the ‘Evaluate Model’ module from the ‘search experiment items’ pane.
Link it with the previous module.
 Your set-up is complete! You just have to hit ‘run’ on the bar located at the bottom of
the page.
Wait for the model to complete training and validation. Once these are complete, hit the
hovering number that appears on the ‘Score Model’ module and select
the ‘Visualize’ option.

The column ‘Scored Labels’ predicts the prices for the automobiles based on the features
we had selected. You can compare the predicted prices with the actual prices and ascertain
the level of accuracy of our model.

Adding the Experiment to the Project:

Now that your experiment has been completed, you can add it to the project folder you had
created beforehand.

 Hit the ‘Project’ tab on the right-most pane and select ‘Add to Project’
 Select the ‘Automobile Price Prediction’ project folder that we had created earlier and
hit the ‘tick’ button.

The experiment is now added to the project.