Pass the Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Associate MLA-C01 Questions and answers with CertsForce

Amazon SageMaker real-time inference endpoints are designed to provide low-latency predictions in production environments. They offer built-in auto scaling to handle unpredictable bursts of requests, ensuring high availability and responsiveness. This approach is fully managed, reduces operational complexity, and is optimized for the range of request sizes (1 KB to 3 MB) specified in the requirements.

This scenario clearly describes an overfitting problem. The neural network performs well on training data but fails to generalize to evaluation data. According to AWS Machine Learning and deep learning best practices, overfitting occurs when a model learns noise or overly specific patterns in the training data instead of generalizable relationships.

L1 and L2 regularization are well-established techniques to combat overfitting. They work by penalizing large weight values during optimization, effectively constraining the model’s complexity. L1 regularization encourages sparsity, while L2 regularization (weight decay) smooths the weight distribution. AWS documentation recommends regularization as a primary method for improving generalization when a model shows a large gap between training and evaluation performance.

Option B is incorrect because removing dropout layers would increase overfitting, not reduce it. Dropout is itself a regularization technique.

Option C would likely worsen overfitting, as training for more epochs allows the model to memorize the training data even further.

Option D increases model complexity, which again exacerbates overfitting rather than resolving it.

Therefore, penalizing large weights using L1 or L2 regularization is the correct solution.

For cross-account Amazon S3 access, AWS requires two components:

An S3 bucket policy in the owning account (Account A) that grants access to a principal in another account

An IAM role policy in the consuming account (Account B) that allows the service to access the bucket

Amazon SageMaker training jobs assume an IAM role in the account where the job runs—in this case, Account B. Therefore, the IAM policy must be attached to the SageMaker execution role in Account B.

The S3 bucket policy must reside in Account A because bucket policies are owned and enforced by the bucket owner. This policy explicitly allows the IAM role from Account B to read the training data.

Any other combination fails either because the policy is in the wrong account or because the role is not the one used by SageMaker.

AWS documentation clearly describes this pattern as the correct way to grant cross-account access for SageMaker training jobs.

Therefore, Option B is the correct and AWS-aligned solution.

Amazon MSK Serverless provides a fully managed Apache Kafka-compatible service that automatically handles provisioning, scaling, and capacity management. AWS documentation states that MSK Serverless is designed for customers who want Kafka functionality without managing infrastructure.

Option B requires capacity planning and scaling management. Option C uses proprietary technology rather than open source. Option D requires full infrastructure management.

MSK Serverless delivers near real-time streaming with minimal operational overhead while maintaining compatibility with open-source Kafka tooling.

Therefore, Option A is the correct solution.

One-hot encoding is the appropriate technique for transforming categorical data, such as color information, into a format suitable for input to a neural network. This technique creates a binary vector representation where each unique category (color) is represented as a separate binary column, ensuring that the model does not infer ordinal relationships between categories. This approach preserves the categorical nature of the data and avoids introducing unintended biases.

To pinpoint inefficiencies inside a training script, AWS recommends using Amazon SageMaker Profiler. SageMaker Profiler provides fine-grained visibility into CPU, GPU, memory, I/O usage, and framework-level operations during training.

By adding profiler annotations directly to the training script, the ML engineer can identify bottlenecks such as inefficient data loading, synchronization delays in DDP, or idle GPU time between training steps.

CloudWatch metrics provide high-level utilization trends but cannot identify exact code-level inefficiencies. CloudTrail is an auditing service and is irrelevant to performance profiling. Model Monitor focuses on data and model quality, not training resource utilization.

Therefore, SageMaker Profiler is the correct tool.

To ensure consistency between training and inference, the min-max normalization statistics (min and max values) calculated during training must be retained and applied to normalize production inference data. Using the same statistics ensures that the model receives data in the same scale and distribution as it did during training, avoiding discrepancies that could degrade model performance. Calculating new statistics from production data would lead to inconsistent normalization and affect predictions.

This scenario describes a severely imbalanced classification problem. In such cases, accuracy is a misleading metric, because the model can achieve high accuracy by predicting only the majority class.

AWS ML best practices recommend using F1 score (or precision/recall) when evaluating imbalanced datasets. The F1 score balances false positives and false negatives, making it ideal for assessing minority-class performance.

For image data, image augmentation (rotations, flips, crops, color jitter) is the preferred technique to increase minority-class representation. SMOTE is designed for tabular data and is not suitable for image pixel data.

Therefore, the correct solution is to optimize for F1 score and apply image augmentation.

Thus, Option B is the correct and AWS-aligned answer.

Amazon Transcribe is well-suited for converting audio data into text, including Spanish.

Amazon Translate can efficiently translate Spanish text into English if needed.

Amazon Bedrock, with the Jurassic model, is designed for tasks like text summarization and can handle large language models (LLMs) seamlessly. This combination provides a low-code, managed solution to process audio, video, and text data with minimal time and effort.

 Problem Description:

The training dataset has a class imbalance, meaning one class (e.g., fraudulent transactions) has fewer samples compared to the majority class (e.g., non-fraudulent transactions). This imbalance affects the model’s ability to learn patterns from the minority class.

 Why SageMaker Data Wrangler?

SageMaker Data Wrangler provides a built-in operation called "Balance Data," which includes oversampling and undersampling techniques to address class imbalances.

Oversampling the minority class replicates samples of the minority class, ensuring the algorithm receives balanced inputs without significant additional operational overhead.

 Steps to Implement:

Import the dataset into SageMaker Data Wrangler.

Apply the "Balance Data" operation and configure it to oversample the minority class.

Export the balanced dataset for training.

 Advantages:

Ease of Use: Minimal configuration is required.

Integrated Workflow: Works seamlessly with the SageMaker ecosystem for preprocessing and model training.

Time Efficiency: Reduces manual effort compared to external tools or scripts.