According to the Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) official study guide and the Microsoft Learn module “Identify features of common machine learning types”, the standard workflow for creating and deploying a machine learning model — especially within Azure Machine Learning Designer — follows a structured sequence of steps to ensure that the model is trained effectively and evaluated correctly.

Here’s the detailed breakdown of the correct order:

Import and prepare a dataset:This is always the first step in the machine learning lifecycle. The dataset is imported into Azure Machine Learning and cleaned or preprocessed. Preparation might include handling missing values, normalizing data, removing outliers, and encoding categorical variables. This ensures the dataset is ready for modeling.

Split the data randomly into training data and validation data:The dataset is then divided into two parts — the training set and the validation (or testing) set. Typically, around 70–80% of the data is used for training and 20–30% for validation. This step ensures that the model can be evaluated on unseen data later, preventing overfitting.

Train the model:During this stage, the machine learning algorithm learns patterns from the training data. Azure Machine Learning Designer provides multiple algorithms (classification, regression, clustering, etc.) that can be applied using “Train Model” components.

Evaluate the model against the validation dataset:Finally, the trained model’s performance is tested using the validation dataset. Evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, or RMSE (depending on the model type) are calculated to assess how well the model generalizes to new data.

The incorrect option — “Evaluate the model against the original dataset” — is not used in proper ML workflows, because evaluating on the same data used for training would give misleadingly high accuracy due to overfitting.