Using R with Amazon SageMaker - Basic Notebook

This notebook’s CI test result for us-west-2 is as follows. CI test results in other regions can be found at the end of the notebook.

Read before running this notebook:

This sample notebook has been updated for SageMaker SDK v2.0.
If you are using SageMaker Notebook instances, select R kernel for the notebook. If you are using SageMaker Studio notebooks, you will need to create a custom R kernel for your studio domain. Follow the instructions in this blog post to create and attach a custom R kernel.
- Bringing your own R environment to Amazon SageMaker Studio

Summary:

This sample Notebook describes how you can develop R scripts in Amazon SageMaker and R Jupyer notebooks. In this notebook we only focus on setting up the SageMaker environment and permissions, and then download the abalone dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. We then do some basic processing and visualization on the data, and will save the data as .CSV format to S3.

For other examples related to R on SageMaker, including end-2-end examples for training, tuning, and deploying models, please visit the GitHub repository located at this link:

https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-sagemaker-examples/tree/master/r_examples

For more details about the R kernel in SageMaker, please visit this news release: Amazon SageMaker notebooks now available with pre-installed R kernel

Reticulating the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK

First, load the reticulate library and import the sagemaker Python module. Once the module is loaded, use the $ notation in R instead of the . notation in Python to use available classes.

[ ]:

library(reticulate)
sagemaker <- import('sagemaker')

Creating and accessing the data storage

The Session class provides operations for working with the following boto3 resources with Amazon SageMaker:

Let’s create an Amazon Simple Storage Service bucket for your data.

[ ]:

session <- sagemaker$Session()
bucket <- session$default_bucket()

Note - The default_bucket function creates a unique Amazon S3 bucket with the following name:

sagemaker-<aws-region-name>-<aws account number>

Specify the IAM role’s ARN to allow Amazon SageMaker to access the Amazon S3 bucket. You can use the same IAM role used to create this Notebook:

[ ]:

role_arn <- sagemaker$get_execution_role()

Downloading and processing the dataset

The model uses the abalone dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. First, download the data and start the exploratory data analysis. Use tidyverse packages to read the data, plot the data, and transform the data into ML format for Amazon SageMaker:

[ ]:

library(readr)
data_file <- 's3://sagemaker-sample-files/datasets/tabular/uci_abalone/abalone.csv'
abalone <- read_csv(file = sagemaker$s3$S3Downloader$read_file(data_file, sagemaker_session=session),
                    col_names = FALSE)
names(abalone) <- c('sex', 'length', 'diameter', 'height', 'whole_weight', 'shucked_weight', 'viscera_weight', 'shell_weight', 'rings')
head(abalone)

The output above shows that sex is a factor data type but is currently a character data type (F is Female, M is male, and I is infant). Change sex to a factor and view the statistical summary of the dataset:

[ ]:

abalone$sex <- as.factor(abalone$sex)
summary(abalone)

The summary above shows that the minimum value for height is 0.

Visually explore which abalones have height equal to 0 by plotting the relationship between rings and height for each value of sex:

[ ]:

library(ggplot2)
options(repr.plot.width = 5, repr.plot.height = 4)
ggplot(abalone, aes(x = height, y = rings, color = sex, alpha=0.5)) + geom_point() + geom_jitter()

[ ]:

# Do OneHotEncoding for Sex column
library(dplyr)

abalone <- abalone %>%
  mutate(female = as.integer(ifelse(sex == 'F', 1, 0)),
         male = as.integer(ifelse(sex == 'M', 1, 0)),
         infant = as.integer(ifelse(sex == 'I', 1, 0))) %>%
  select(-sex)
abalone <- abalone %>%
  select(rings:infant, length:shell_weight)
head(abalone)

Now let’s write the dataframe to a CSV file locally on the SageMaker instance.

[ ]:

write_csv(abalone, 'abalone.csv', col_names = TRUE)

Then, upload the csv file to the Amazon S3 default bucket into the data key:

[ ]:

s3_train <- session$upload_data(path = 'abalone.csv',
                                bucket = bucket,
                                key_prefix = 'r_hello_world_demo/data')

s3_path = paste('s3://',bucket,'/r_hello_world_demo/data/abalone.csv',sep = '')
cat('Your CSV data is stored on S3 in this location:\n',s3_path)

Extensions

This example walked you through a simple process for setting up your SageMaker environment and write your R script. In addition, you were able to download a dataset, process it, visualize it, and then store it on S3.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can leverage R on SageMaker and take advantage of SageMaker features for training, tuning, and deploying machine learning models, visit other exampls in this GitHub repository:

https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-sagemaker-examples/tree/master/r_examples

Notebook CI Test Results

This notebook was tested in multiple regions. The test results are as follows, except for us-west-2 which is shown at the top of the notebook.