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Run Azure Machine Learning workloads with automated machine learning on Apache Spark in HDInsight

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Azure Machine Learning simplifies and accelerates the building, training, and deployment of machine learning models. In automated machine learning (AutoML), you start with training data that has a defined target feature. Iterate through combinations of algorithms and feature selections automatically select the best model for your data based on the training scores. HDInsight allows customers to provision clusters with hundreds of nodes. AutoML running on Spark in an HDInsight cluster allows users to use compute capacity across these nodes to run training jobs in a scale-out fashion, and to run multiple training jobs in parallel. It allows users to run AutoML experiments while sharing the compute with their other big data workloads.

Install Azure Machine Learning on an HDInsight cluster

For general tutorials of automated machine learning, see Tutorial: Use automated machine learning to build your regression model. All new HDInsight-Spark clusters come pre-installed with AzureML-AutoML SDK.

Note

Azure Machine Learning packages are installed into Python3 conda environment. The installed Jupyter Notebook should be run using the PySpark3 kernel.

You can use Zeppelin notebooks to use AutoML as well.

Authentication for workspace

Workspace creation and experiment submission require an authentication token. This token can be generated using an Microsoft Entra application. An Microsoft Entra user can also be used to generate the required authentication token, if multi-factor authentication isn't enabled on the account.

The following code snippet creates an authentication token using an Microsoft Entra application.

from azureml.core.authentication import ServicePrincipalAuthentication
auth_sp = ServicePrincipalAuthentication(
    tenant_id='<Azure Tenant ID>',
    service_principal_id='<Azure AD Application ID>',
    service_principal_password='<Azure AD Application Key>'
)

The following code snippet creates an authentication token using an Microsoft Entra user.

from azure.common.credentials import UserPassCredentials
credentials = UserPassCredentials('user@domain.com', 'my_smart_password')

Loading dataset

Automated machine learning on Spark uses Dataflows, which are lazily evaluated, immutable operations on data. A Dataflow can load a dataset from a blob with public read access, or from a blob URL with a SAS token.

import azureml.dataprep as dprep

dataflow_public = dprep.read_csv(
    path='https://commonartifacts.blob.core.windows.net/automl/UCI_Adult_train.csv')

dataflow_with_token = dprep.read_csv(
    path='https://dpreptestfiles.blob.core.windows.net/testfiles/read_csv_duplicate_headers.csv?st=2018-06-15T23%3A01%3A42Z&se=2019-06-16T23%3A01%3A00Z&sp=r&sv=2017-04-17&sr=b&sig=ugQQCmeC2eBamm6ynM7wnI%2BI3TTDTM6z9RPKj4a%2FU6g%3D')

You can also register the datastore with the workspace using a one-time registration.

Experiment submission

In the automated machine learning configuration, the property spark_context should be set for the package to run on distributed mode. The property concurrent_iterations, which is the maximum number of iterations executed in parallel, should be set to a number less than the executor cores for the Spark app.

Next steps