In this tutorial, we will build an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for predicting the bank customer churn using python notebook and Microsoft Azure services. Please note that there is a lot Azure Machine Learning (ML) provides and in this article, I’ll demonstrate how easy it is to code and run a notebook using Azure resources and python.

Pre-requisite

1. You should be familiar with machine learning. Even if you don’t understand, try to follow along and keep practicing.
2. You should be aware of Tensorflow. You can find tons of material online and learn about it.
3. You must have a Microsoft Azure subscription. Azure provides free credits to college or university students. Create an account here.

Creating Azure Machine Learning service

1. Go to the Azure portal and click on the ‘+’ symbol to create a resource.
2. Search for ‘Machine Learning’ and click on create.
3. Enter the details and click on ‘review and create’
4. Finally, click on ‘create’ to start the process of deployment.
5. Your service should be ready to use after around 3–4 minutes and you should see something like this:

Azure Machine Learning

Azure Machine learning Workspace

1. Go to the Azure Machine learning portal.
2. Make sure you login with the same email id as you used to login to the Azure portal.
3. Take a moment to understand the information being asked.
4. Select the correct subscription and the workspace. Remember the workspace we created earlier, you will find it here to select.
5. Once done, click ‘Get Started’. Your workspace is ready to be used!
6. This is what it should look like. I would highly recommend that you spend a great amount of time seeing the services provided. At the bottom, you can find nice documentation to help you get started.
7. In the Azure Machine Learning workspace, select ‘create new’ and then ‘Notebook’.
8. A dialog pops up asking you to name your file. Here I am creating a file named ‘CustomerChurn.ipnyb’.
9. Download this dataset from Kaggle and upload it on the Azure ML portal under your Notebook folder along with your ipnyb file.

Create compute

Open your notebook and in the first cell type ‘7+5’ and run it using the little triangle (run) button on the left side of that cell. You should see below:

Compute is an important concept without which you will not be able to run a cell (or entire notebook). Follow along to create a compute:

1. Click on ‘click compute’ as shown above.
2. Select the virtual machine size you would like to use for your compute instance.
3. Toggle between CPU or GPU virtual machine types. When using GPU-enabled virtual machines, make sure your code is written to leverage available GPU devices.
4. Select other options as needed. If you are just trying Azure, I recommend always choose options that are either free or has the least cost.
5. Select ‘create’ and it will take around 10–12 minutes to create a virtual machine to be ready for use. Now you should be able to run your cell.

#python #artificial-neural-network #deep-learning #azure