How to run a python script in the background on azure - machine-learning

Question

I have a uni project in which I have to run a number of machine learning algorithms like SVM, ME, Naive bayes, etc... and perform a grid search on them, to find the optimal sets of hyper-parameters. Running all these would take an exceedingly long amount of time (48-168 hours total but run- in batches) and considering my computer becomes more or less unusable while I run them, I was attempting to find a solution which allowed me to run my code externally. The scripts I have to run are in python and my plan was to run them on azure to make use of its "Azure for students" $100 credit.
My original plan was to use azure's ml notebook section and then run the python scripts in the terminal they provide. My problem with this route is as far as I can tell, when the browser closes, the computation stops which is a problem. I looked into it, and I found some articles mentioning a combination of 'ctrl-z', 'bg', and 'disown', to disconnect the process from the shell but I thought there should definitely be a better way to do it. (I also wasn't sure how this worked in my case where there were 8 processes running at once using gridsearchcv's n_jobs=-1 feature).
I then realized a better way to do this would be to use pipelines. My intent was to create a number of pipelines of the form:
(Import data in xlsx file) -> (python script to run ML) -> (export data to working directory)
And then run them until all the work is completed. In the first stage I used the parameters,
And I got the error,
My intention was to have the excel file pipe into the python script as a data frame but this implantation (and all the others I've tried) isn't working.
My question first question is, how do I get the excel data to pipe into the python script properly?
My second question is, is there a better way to go about doing this? Would running it on the shell be an easier way to do it? If so, how do ensure it runs while my browser is closed? Are there other services that would be better? My main metrics for this are price (Cheap) and time limit (ability to run for long time) but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I also tried using google colab, this worked but it felt slower than running on my computer.

Answer 1

To run a grid search with AzureML, you would use the Sweep job. The simplest way to kick of a Sweep is via the CLI. See here for an example.
$schema: https://azuremlschemas.azureedge.net/latest/sweepJob.schema.json
type: sweep
trial:
command: >-
python hello-sweep.py
--A ${{inputs.A}}
--B ${{search_space.B}}
--C ${{search_space.C}}
code: src
environment: azureml:AzureML-sklearn-1.0-ubuntu20.04-py38-cpu#latest
inputs:
A: 0.5
compute: azureml:cpu-cluster
sampling_algorithm: random
search_space:
B:
type: choice
values: ["hello", "world", "hello_world"]
C:
type: uniform
min_value: 0.1
max_value: 1.0
objective:
goal: minimize
primary_metric: random_metric
limits:
max_total_trials: 4
max_concurrent_trials: 2
timeout: 3600
display_name: hello-sweep-example
experiment_name: hello-sweep-example
description: Hello sweep job example.
You can start that job using the AzureML v2 CLI with the following command:
az ml job create -f hello-sweep.yml
That will create max_total_trials number of jobs for different parameter combinations as defined in the search_space governed by the sampling_algorithm, which can be random, grid or bayesian.
The actual job that is started is defined under trial. You need a program or script of some sort that you can execute via a command line and that can take parameters via that command line. command is that command that is executed, code is a folder on the local machine that contains the script/program you want to run and environment is a registered environment in your workspace. azureml:AzureML-sklearn-1.0-ubuntu20.04-py38-cpu#latest is one that is predefined in AzureML, but you can also create your own.
If you prefer Python, here is the same thing done in Python.
See here for a blog post on How to do hyperparameter tuning using Azure ML.