Databricks ML Data Scientist Databricks-Machine-Learning-Associate New Questions

Ensemble learning is a machine learning technique that involves combining several models to solve a particular problem. The scenario described fits the concept of ensemble learning, where two models, each performing well under different conditions, are combined to create a more robust model. This approach often leads to better performance as it combines the strengths of multiple models.

References

• Introduction to Ensemble Learning: https://machinelearningmastery.com/ensemble-machine-learning-algorithms-python-scikit-learn/

When using theHyperoptlibrary withfmin, the goal is to find the minimum of the objective function. Since you are usingcross_val_scoreto calculate the R2 score which is a measure of the proportion of the variance for a dependent variable that's explained by an independent variable(s) in a regression model, higher values are better. However,fminseeks to minimize the objective function, so to align withfmin's goal, you should return the negative of the R2 score (-r2). This way, by minimizing the negative R2,fminis effectively maximizing the R2 score, which can lead to a more accurate model.

References

• Hyperopt Documentation: http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt/
• Scikit-Learn documentation on model evaluation: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/model_evaluation.html

To address the concern about standardizing features prior to splitting the data, the correct approach is to use the Pipeline API to ensure that only the training data's summary statistics are used to standardize the test data. This is achieved by fitting the StandardScaler (or any scaler) on the training data and then transforming both the training and test data using the fitted scaler. This approach prevents information leakage from the test data into the model training process and ensures that the model is evaluated fairly.References:

• Best Practices in Preprocessing in Spark ML (Handling Data Splits and Feature Standardization).

The method that transforms categorical features into a series of binary indicator variables is known as one-hot encoding. This technique converts each categorical value into a new binary column, which is essential for models that require numerical input. One-hot encoding is widely used because it helps to handle categorical data without introducing a false ordinal relationship among categories.References:

• Feature Engineering Techniques (One-Hot Encoding).