• Contents:

Automatic Model Tuning (AMT)

Ref: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-machine-learning-engineer-associate-mla-c01/learn/lecture/45285731

• ❗ Hyperparameter tuning is far from trivial!
  • 💡 ML Engineers often have to experiment (trial & error)
    • What are best hyperparameters? Best values for hyperparameters? Depth of NN? …
    • How to avoid overfitting, getting stuck in local minima…?
    • Every hyperparameter to tune adds new combination with other hyperparameters → Problem blows out quickly (scales exponentially) with many different hyperparameters
• 🔧 AMT = Automation tool, greatly reduces hyperparameter tuning overhead
• Process
  1. You define hyperparameters, ranges you want to try & metrics you are optimizing for
  2. SageMaker spins up a “HyperParameter Tuning Job” that trains as many combinations as you’ll allow (spinning training instances as needed)
  3. Set of hyperparameters producing best results can be deployed as a model
• ‼️ AMT learns as it goes, doesn't have to try every possible combination!
  • Can also do early stopping automatically
  • Saves a lot of time & money!!!
• Best Practices
  • Don’t optimize too many hyperparameters at once
    • Focus on the important ones
  • Limit your ranges to as small a range as possible
    • Don't explore crazy values if you have guidelines already
  • Use logarithmic scales when appropriate
    • Helps if e.g. range of a hyperparameter is 0.0001 to 0.1
  • Don’t run too many training jobs concurrently
    • Limits how well the process can learn as it goes
  • Make sure training jobs running on multiple instances report the correct objective metric in the end

Hyperparameter Tuning Configurations in AMT

Ref: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-machine-learning-engineer-associate-mla-c01/learn/lecture/45285747

• Early Stopping → If set to Auto, stops training if tuning job is not improving objective metric significantly
  • 👍 Reduces compute time, avoids overfitting
  • ❗ ONLY for algorithms that emit objective metric after each epoch (most NNs do this)
• Warm Start → Uses one or more previous tuning jobs as a starting point, i.e. “remembers” which hyperparameter combinations to search next
  • Allows stop/restart of tuning jobs (stopping can be beneficial when bottlenecked by resources)
  • Two types:
    1. IDENTICAL_DATA_AND_ALGORITHM → same dataset and algorithm
    2. TRANSFER_LEARNING → we can use a new dataset, but still continue where we left off
• Resource Limits → Default limits for number of parallel tuning jobs, number of hyperparameters, number of training jobs per tuning job, etc.
  • Limits are quite high by default
  • Increasing limits requires support request to increase quota (AWS put these limits to prevent overspending by people who don't really know what they're doing)

Hyperparameter Tuning Approaches

Ref: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-machine-learning-engineer-associate-mla-c01/learn/lecture/45285747

• Grid search → Try every possible combination (Brute force!)
  • Limited to categorical parameters
  • ❗ Scales very poorly, can get out of hand very quickly
• Random search → Chooses a random combination of hyperparameter values on each job
  • 💡 Do you feel lucky, punk? :) Hope to get the optimal configuration in not so many tries
  • 👍 Important advantage: no dependence on prior runs → good support for parallel jobs
• Bayesian optimization → Treats tuning as a regression problem
  • 👍 Learns from each run to converge on optimal values
  • ❗ Runs must be sequential in order to learn from previous ones → parallel jobs not well supported
    • 💡 The learning sometimes helps to reach the objective sooner than parallel jobs