The Amazon AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty certification is designed to prove your skills in creating, training, tuning, and implementing machine learning models on AWS. Individuals with more than 2 years of experience in developing, architecting, operating machine learning workloads in the AWS Cloud are the best audience. In addition, individuals who perform data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are suitable candidates. Experience in dealing with ML algorithms, fundamental hyperparameter optimization, deep learning frameworks, and operational best practices is required before opting for the certification exam.
To obtain the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty designation, candidates have to pass one exam – MLS-C01. It validates your skills to implement the suitable ML approach to solve the given business task, apply ML solutions through identifying the suitable AWS services, create and perform reliable and secure ML solutions. To demonstrate your skills at the exam, you will be given 65 questions of multiple choice and multiple response types which you are to complete within 180 minutes. Only 50 questions will be scored and you need to gain 750 points. The exam will cost you $300.
To succeed in this evaluation, you need to have solid skills in the 4 exam domains.
The first domain is devoted to data engineering. In this section, your skills to create data repositories for ML, defining data sources, applying data ingestion solution will be checked. Your proficiency in implementing data transformation solution will also be checked.
The second domain is focused on exploratory data analysis. Here, you should be able to prepare data for modeling. To be precise, you should possess skills to define and handle missing data, stop words, format, normalize, and scale, and lable data. In addition, your skills to deal with feature engineering, and analyzing data for ML will be assessed.
The third domain is all about modeling. In this part, you should be able to solve machine learning problems, implement the best model for a given issue, and train ML models. Besides, you should be ready to demonstrate hyperparameter optimization skills which refer to working with cross validation, model initialization, tree-based and linear models. Your ability to assess machine learning models will also be testified.
The fourth section is centered on ML operations and implementation. The exam questions in this part are based on your ability to create ML solutions suitable for performance, availability, resiliency, and fault tolerance. That’s why you will have to show how proficient you are in using CloudWatch and CloudTrail, Docker containers, Auto Scaling groups, Provisioned IOPS, AWS best practices, and load balancing. In addition, you are required to use the suitable ML features and services for a given issue and implement fundamental AWS security practices for ML solutions. Moreover, your skills to deploy ML solutions will be tested. This implies interacting with endpoints and exposing them, working with A/B testing, and ML troubleshooting.
According to the Ziprecruiter website, certified specialists with the Amazon AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty designation earn annually about $111,295. Gaining more experience and advancing your skills, these figures can transform into the $181,500 per annum.