Link to all the project files

Prerequisites

Before running this notebook, ensure you have the following libraries installed and understand the underlying concepts:

Required Libraries:

• PyTorch: A deep learning framework essential for building and training neural networks. PyTorch supports flexible and efficient computation for model architectures like GRU (Gated Recurrent Units).

• GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit): A type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) used for handling sequential data, commonly employed in time series or NLP tasks due to its ability to capture long-term dependencies efficiently.

• NumPy: A fundamental library for numerical computations. NumPy is crucial for data manipulation and mathematical operations, such as matrix operations and feature extraction, that are often performed during model training.

Concepts to Be Familiar With:

• Training and Testing Machine Learning Models: Understanding how models are trained (fitting them to training data) and tested (evaluating performance on unseen data) is essential.

• API Endpoints: Learn how to deploy models as RESTful APIs, which will enable easy interaction with the model for real-time inference in production environments.

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Why Use Pipelines in AI and ML?

While deploying machine learning models directly to cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure ML, AWS, or Google Cloud AI is common, it doesn’t fully address the challenges that arise as the model lifecycle grows in complexity. Pipelines automate and streamline the model development and deployment process, handling both simple and complex use cases effectively.

Example Scenario:

Imagine deploying an updated model that performs the same task as the previous model but with improved performance. How would you manage the update?

• Would you deploy the new model to a second REST endpoint and eventually decommission the old endpoint?
• As the complexity of the task grows (e.g., predicting cricket scores with real-time match parameters), managing multiple models and ensuring smooth updates becomes more difficult.

The solution is to automate the entire workflow using pipelines.

The Key Role of Pipelines:

Pipelines automate data preprocessing, model training, evaluation, and deployment, addressing challenges such as:

• Ensuring model updates, retraining, and deployment happen seamlessly without manual intervention.
• Providing access control to restrict who can modify specific parts of the process, ensuring data and model integrity.
• Enabling scalable workflows that can handle growing datasets and complex models.

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Goals of Pipelines in AI/ML:

1. Automation:

• Pipelines automate the full machine learning lifecycle, from data ingestion to deployment. This reduces human error and ensures that processes are reproducible and efficient.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices can be integrated into the pipeline, enabling frequent model updates without disrupting services.

2. Access Control and Security:

• With pipelines, you can implement fine-grained access control over each stage of the machine learning workflow, preventing unauthorized changes.
• Security features ensure that sensitive data is handled properly at every stage of the pipeline.

3. Scalability and Reproducibility:

• Pipelines can scale with the increasing size and complexity of your data and models, providing consistent results across different stages.
• Reproducibility is guaranteed, as each step in the pipeline is automated and versioned, making it easy to recreate experiments or debug issues.

4. Versioning and Collaboration:

• Pipelines support version control, making it easy to track different versions of models and datasets, enabling better collaboration among team members.
• Each part of the pipeline (training, evaluation, deployment) can be updated independently without disrupting the rest of the process.

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Steps Involved in the Project

1. Setup Workspace and Compute Resources

• Set up an Azure workspace and provision compute resources (e.g., Azure Virtual Machines) for data processing and model training. These resources allow for efficient handling of large-scale operations.

2. Upload Files and Resources

• Uploaded the pretrained model and vocab.txt to the Azure workspace, ensuring that these resources are available for future training and tokenization tasks.

3. Connect to Workspace

• Established a secure connection to the Azure workspace using the Azure ML SDK. This allows seamless access to Azure resources for model management and execution of machine learning tasks.

4. Model Registration

• Registered the pretrained model within Azure ML to facilitate versioning, easy access, and future training or deployment steps.

5. Upload Vocabulary File

• Uploaded the vocab.txt file to the workspace, which contains the vocabulary required for tokenizing input data and training the model.

6. Dataset Preparation

• Stored the dataset.csv in Azure Blob Storage, ensuring that it is accessible for preprocessing and model training. Blob Storage is ideal for large-scale data storage and efficient access during training.

7. script1.py: Data Preparation

• Developed script1.py to preprocess the dataset. It tokenizes the input data, performs feature extraction, and splits it into training (train_x, train_y) and testing (test_x, test_y) sets. The preprocessed data is then saved for use in subsequent pipeline steps.

8. script2.py: Model Training

• Created script2.py to fine-tune the pretrained model using the training data (train_x, train_y). The model is then registered and prepared for evaluation using the test data (test_x, test_y).

9. script3.py: Model Comparison and Evaluation

• Implemented script3.py to evaluate both the old and new models using the test data (test_x, test_y). The performance comparison is recorded in an output file, where True indicates the new model performs better than the old one.

10. Pipeline for Model Training and Evaluation

- Designed a pipeline to automate model training, evaluation, and comparison, ensuring reproducibility and efficiency. This pipeline can be run as part of a CI/CD workflow to streamline model updates.

11. score.py: Web Input Processing and Prediction

- Developed `score.py` to process incoming data from web applications. It tokenizes the text using `vocab.txt`, feeds it to the trained model, and generates a prediction. This script is designed to handle real-time inference in production environments.

12. script4.py: Deployment Script

- Wrote `script4.py` to automate the deployment of the latest model to an Azure endpoint. This script ensures that the model is ready to serve predictions based on incoming web requests.

13. Pipeline for Deployment

- Built a deployment pipeline that automates the process of deploying models and serving them via API endpoints. This pipeline integrates model registration, deployment scripts, and scaling capabilities to ensure efficient deployment.

14. Function: MLOps

- Developed the `MLOps` function to orchestrate both the training and deployment pipelines. By passing the name of the dataset as an argument, this function ensures the execution of model training followed by deployment, streamlining the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle.

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For Detailed steps, you can refer to readme_MLOps.ipynb file.

By following these steps, this project automates the entire machine learning lifecycle—from data preprocessing to model deployment—using Azure ML. The use of pipelines ensures that the process is efficient, reproducible, and scalable, while allowing for easy updates and model comparisons.