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A data scientist has written a feature engineering notebook that utilizes the pandas library. As the size of the data processed by the notebook increases, the notebook's runtime is drastically increasing, but it is processing slowly as the size of the data included in the process increases.
Which of the following tools can the data scientist use to spend the least amount of time refactoring their notebook to scale with big data?
The pandas API on Spark provides a way to scale pandas operations to big data while minimizing the need for refactoring existing pandas code. It allows users to run pandas operations on Spark DataFrames, leveraging Spark's distributed computing capabilities to handle large datasets more efficiently. This approach requires minimal changes to the existing code, making it a convenient option for scaling pandas-based feature engineering notebooks.
Databricks documentation on pandas API on Spark: pandas API on Spark
An organization is developing a feature repository and is electing to one-hot encode all categorical feature variables. A data scientist suggests that the categorical feature variables should not be one-hot encoded within the feature repository.
Which of the following explanations justifies this suggestion?
The suggestion not to one-hot encode categorical feature variables within the feature repository is justified because one-hot encoding can be problematic for some machine learning algorithms. Specifically, one-hot encoding increases the dimensionality of the data, which can be computationally expensive and may lead to issues such as multicollinearity and overfitting. Additionally, some algorithms, such as tree-based methods, can handle categorical variables directly without requiring one-hot encoding.
Databricks documentation on feature engineering: Feature Engineering
A machine learning engineer is trying to scale a machine learning pipeline pipeline that contains multiple feature engineering stages and a modeling stage. As part of the cross-validation process, they are using the following code block:

A colleague suggests that the code block can be changed to speed up the tuning process by passing the model object to the estimator parameter and then placing the updated cv object as the final stage of the pipeline in place of the original model.
Which of the following is a negative consequence of the approach suggested by the colleague?
If the model object is passed to the estimator parameter of CrossValidator and the cross-validation object itself is placed as a stage in the pipeline, the feature engineering stages within the pipeline would be applied separately to each training and validation fold during cross-validation. This leads to a significant issue: the feature engineering stages would be computed using validation data, thereby leaking information from the validation set into the training process. This would potentially invalidate the cross-validation results by giving an overly optimistic performance estimate. Reference:
Cross-validation and Pipeline Integration in MLlib (Avoiding Data Leakage in Pipelines).
A data scientist is using Spark ML to engineer features for an exploratory machine learning project.
They decide they want to standardize their features using the following code block:

Upon code review, a colleague expressed concern with the features being standardized prior to splitting the data into a training set and a test set.
Which of the following changes can the data scientist make to address the concern?
To address the concern about standardizing features prior to splitting the data, the correct approach is to use the Pipeline API to ensure that only the training data's summary statistics are used to standardize the test data. This is achieved by fitting the StandardScaler (or any scaler) on the training data and then transforming both the training and test data using the fitted scaler. This approach prevents information leakage from the test data into the model training process and ensures that the model is evaluated fairly. Reference:
Best Practices in Preprocessing in Spark ML (Handling Data Splits and Feature Standardization).
A data scientist is working with a feature set with the following schema:

The customer_id column is the primary key in the feature set. Each of the columns in the feature set has missing values. They want to replace the missing values by imputing a common value for each feature.
Which of the following lists all of the columns in the feature set that need to be imputed using the most common value of the column?
For the feature set schema provided, the columns that need to be imputed using the most common value (mode) are typically the categorical columns. In this case, loyalty_tier is the only categorical column that should be imputed using the most common value. customer_id is a unique identifier and should not be imputed, while spend and units are numerical columns that should typically be imputed using the mean or median values, not the mode.
Databricks documentation on missing value imputation: Handling Missing Data
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