MLS-C01 Modeling Practice Test 33 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Refer to the exhibit. The training job 'my-job' failed with the error 'Unable to pull image from ECR'. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The IAM role does not have permission to pull images from the ECR repository.. The error 'Unable to pull image from ECR' indicates that the SageMaker training job could not retrieve the custom Docker image stored in Amazon ECR. The most likely cause is that the IAM role associated with the training job lacks the `ecr:GetDownloadUrlForLayer` and `ecr:BatchGetImage` permissions required to pull images from the ECR repository. Without these permissions, SageMaker cannot authenticate and download the container image, even if the repository and image exist.

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The instance type ml.m5.large does not support custom images.

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The S3 bucket for training data is in a different account.

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The role ARN is incorrect.

Question 2

A data scientist is training a binary classification model on a highly imbalanced dataset (99% negative class, 1% positive class). The model currently achieves 99% accuracy but only identifies 0.5% of true positives. Which metric should the data scientist focus on to improve model performance?

Accepted Answer

Recall. Recall (sensitivity) measures the proportion of actual positives correctly identified, which is critical when the dataset is highly imbalanced (99% negative, 1% positive) and the model fails to detect most positives (only 0.5% true positives). Improving recall directly addresses the model's inability to capture the minority class, even if it reduces precision or accuracy. In binary classification with severe class imbalance, accuracy is misleading because a model can achieve 99% accuracy by simply predicting the majority class, as seen here.

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Precision

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Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)

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Accuracy

Question 3

A company is deploying a real-time fraud detection model using Amazon SageMaker. The model must make predictions in under 100 milliseconds. The data scientist uses a pre-trained XGBoost model and deploys it to a SageMaker endpoint with an ml.c5.xlarge instance. After load testing, the average latency is 150 ms. Which action should the data scientist take to reduce latency?

Accepted Answer

Enable SageMaker Neo to compile the model for the target instance. SageMaker Neo optimizes trained models for the target hardware platform by compiling them into an efficient runtime. This reduces inference latency without changing the model architecture, making it ideal for meeting the sub-100ms requirement when the current latency is 150ms on an ml.c5.xlarge instance.

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Reduce the number of trees in the XGBoost model

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Deploy multiple instances behind a load balancer

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Use a larger instance type to increase compute capacity

Question 4

A data scientist is building a recommendation system for an e-commerce platform using Amazon SageMaker. The system needs to provide personalized product recommendations based on user purchase history and product metadata. The dataset contains 10 million users and 1 million products. Which algorithm should the data scientist use as the core of the recommendation engine?

Accepted Answer

Factorization Machines. Factorization Machines (FM) are specifically designed for high-dimensional sparse data like user-item interactions, making them ideal for recommendation systems with 10 million users and 1 million products. FM can capture pairwise feature interactions (e.g., user-product affinities) efficiently using factorized parameters, which scales well to large datasets and supports personalized recommendations from purchase history and metadata.

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Linear Learner

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XGBoost

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K-Means

Question 5

A data scientist is training a deep learning model for image classification using Amazon SageMaker. The training job is taking too long. The data scientist wants to use distributed training across multiple GPUs to speed up the process. Which SageMaker feature should the data scientist use?

Accepted Answer

SageMaker Distributed Training Libraries. SageMaker Distributed Training Libraries provide optimized implementations of data parallelism and model parallelism that automatically partition the model and data across multiple GPUs, reducing training time for deep learning models. This is the correct choice because the question specifically asks for a feature to enable distributed training across multiple GPUs, which is exactly what these libraries are designed for.

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SageMaker Managed Spot Training

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SageMaker Hyperparameter Tuning

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SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning

Question 6

A data scientist is training a text classification model using Amazon SageMaker. The dataset consists of 100,000 labeled documents. The data scientist notices that the model performs well on the training set but poorly on the validation set. Which regularization technique should the data scientist apply to reduce overfitting?

Accepted Answer

Dropout. Dropout is a regularization technique that randomly drops a fraction of neurons during training, which prevents the model from relying too heavily on any single feature and forces it to learn more robust representations. This directly addresses the overfitting symptom of high training accuracy and low validation accuracy by reducing the model's capacity to memorize noise in the training data.

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Data augmentation

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Batch normalization

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Early stopping

Question 7

A company wants to build a machine learning model to predict customer churn. The dataset includes customer demographics, usage patterns, and support interactions. The data is stored in Amazon S3. The data scientist needs to perform feature engineering, including creating aggregate features from support interactions and encoding categorical variables. Which AWS service is most suitable for building the feature engineering pipeline?

Accepted Answer

Amazon SageMaker Processing. Amazon SageMaker Processing is the most suitable service because it is purpose-built for data preprocessing and feature engineering within the SageMaker ecosystem. It allows you to run custom Python scripts (e.g., using pandas or PySpark) on managed infrastructure to create aggregate features from support interactions and encode categorical variables, and it integrates seamlessly with SageMaker for model training and deployment.

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AWS Glue

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Amazon EMR

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AWS Batch

Question 8

A data scientist is training a linear regression model to predict house prices. The dataset contains 10 features. After training, the data scientist notices that the model has high bias (underfitting). Which action should the data scientist take to reduce bias?

Accepted Answer

Add more features, such as polynomial features. High bias (underfitting) means the model is too simple to capture the underlying patterns in the data. Adding more features, such as polynomial features, increases model complexity, allowing the linear regression model to fit non-linear relationships and reduce bias. This directly addresses the underfitting issue by giving the model more expressive power.

Answer

Reduce the amount of training data

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Increase the regularization strength

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Use a simpler model, such as ridge regression

Question 9

A data scientist is using Amazon SageMaker to train a neural network. The training job fails with the error 'ResourceLimitExceeded: The account-level service limit for ml.p3.8xlarge for training job usage is 0.' What is the most likely cause and solution?

Accepted Answer

The account has not requested a limit increase for ml.p3.8xlarge; submit a limit increase request via AWS Support.. The error message explicitly states that the account-level service limit for ml.p3.8xlarge for training job usage is 0, which means the account has not been granted any capacity for that instance type. AWS enforces service quotas (limits) per account per region, and for GPU-intensive instances like ml.p3.8xlarge, the default limit is often 0 unless a limit increase request has been submitted and approved. Therefore, the correct solution is to request a limit increase via AWS Support.

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The training job is using spot instances; switch to on-demand instances.

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The instance type is not available in the current region; switch to a different region.

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The instance type is too large; use a smaller instance type like ml.m5.large.

Question 10

A company is building a machine learning model to detect anomalies in industrial sensor data. The data is time-series with seasonal patterns. The data scientist wants to use Amazon SageMaker to train a model. Which algorithm is most suitable for this task?

Accepted Answer

Random Cut Forest (RCF). Random Cut Forest (RCF) is the most suitable algorithm because it is designed for unsupervised anomaly detection on streaming and time-series data. It works by constructing an ensemble of random trees that isolate anomalies based on how quickly a data point can be separated from the rest, making it effective for detecting outliers in sensor data with seasonal patterns without requiring labeled training data.

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K-Means

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DeepAR

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XGBoost

Question 11

A data scientist is training a classification model on a dataset with missing values in several features. The data scientist wants to use SageMaker to train the model. Which TWO approaches can the data scientist use to handle missing data within the SageMaker training pipeline? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use the SageMaker built-in XGBoost algorithm, which can handle missing values by default.. The SageMaker built-in XGBoost algorithm has a built-in mechanism to handle missing values by default. It learns the best direction (left or right branch) to route missing values during training, so no explicit imputation is needed. This makes it a seamless choice for datasets with missing data within the SageMaker training pipeline.

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Use the SageMaker BlazingText algorithm, which automatically imputes missing values.

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Use SageMaker Inference Pipeline to handle missing values at inference time.

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Use SageMaker PCA algorithm, which automatically handles missing values.

Question 12

A data scientist is developing a deep learning model for object detection using Amazon SageMaker. The training dataset has 50,000 labeled images. The data scientist wants to improve model generalization without collecting more data. Which TWO techniques can be applied? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Apply data augmentation techniques such as random cropping and horizontal flipping.. Data augmentation techniques like random cropping and horizontal flipping artificially expand the training dataset by generating modified versions of existing images. This exposes the model to more varied input patterns, reducing overfitting and improving generalization without requiring new labeled data.

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Increase the learning rate to speed up convergence.

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Increase the number of training epochs to ensure convergence.

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Increase the batch size to reduce variance.

Question 13

A data scientist is evaluating a binary classification model. The model's confusion matrix shows: True Positives=80, False Positives=20, True Negatives=900, False Negatives=0. Which THREE metrics can be calculated from this confusion matrix? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Precision. Precision is calculated as TP/(TP+FP) = 80/(80+20) = 0.80. This metric measures the proportion of positive identifications that were actually correct, which is directly derivable from the confusion matrix values.

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AUC-ROC

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Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)

Question 14

A data scientist is assigned an IAM policy as shown. The data scientist attempts to create a SageMaker endpoint to deploy a model, but the request fails. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The data scientist does not have permission to create an endpoint.. The IAM policy shown does not include the `sagemaker:CreateEndpoint` action, which is required to create a SageMaker endpoint. Even if the data scientist has permissions for other SageMaker actions like `CreateModel` or `CreateEndpointConfig`, the explicit absence of `CreateEndpoint` in the policy will cause the request to fail with an access denied error. AWS IAM policies must explicitly grant each action needed for the operation.

Answer

The data scientist does not have permission to upload the model to S3.

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The data scientist does not have permission to create a training job.

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The data scientist does not have permission to pass roles.

Question 15

A company is training a deep learning model on a large dataset using Amazon SageMaker. The training script uses TensorFlow and requires GPUs. The training job is failing with an out-of-memory error. Which configuration change should be made to resolve this issue?

Accepted Answer

Use a larger instance type with more GPU memory.. The training job is failing with an out-of-memory error, which indicates that the model or batch size exceeds the GPU memory capacity of the current instance. Using a larger instance type with more GPU memory directly addresses this by providing additional VRAM, allowing the model to fit in memory and the training to proceed without failure.

Answer

Increase the number of instances in the training job.

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Switch to using spot instances to reduce cost.

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Enable distributed training across multiple instances.