You work for a magazine distributor and need to build a model that predicts which...

Option A is incorrect because using AI Platform notebooks to perform a Lasso regression analysis on your model, which will eliminate features that do not provide a strong signal, is not a suitable way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model.  Lasso regression is a method of feature selection that applies a penalty to the coefficients of the linear model, and shrinks them to zero for irrelevant features 1 . However, this method assumes that the model is linear and additive, which may not be the case for a TensorFlow model. Moreover, this method does not provide feature attributions for each prediction, but rather for the entire dataset.

Option B is incorrect because streaming prediction results to BigQuery, and using BigQuery’s CORR(X1, X2) function to calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient between each feature and the target variable, is not a valid way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model.  The Pearson corr elation coefficient is a measure of the linear relationship between two variables, ranging from -1 to 1 2 . However, this method does not account for the interactions between features or the non-linearity of the model. Moreover, this method does not provide feature attributions for each prediction, but rather for the entire dataset.

Option C is correct because using the AI Explanations feature on AI Platform, and submitting each prediction request with the ‘explain’ keyword to retrieve feature attributions using the sampled Shapley method, is the best way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model.  AI Explanations is a service that allows you to get feature attributions for your deployed models on AI Platform 3 .  Feature attributions are values that indicate how much each feature contributed to the prediction for a given instance 4 .  The sampled Shapley method is a technique that uses the Shapley value, a game-theoretic concept, to measure the contribution of each feature to the prediction 5 . By using AI Explanations, you can get feature attributions for each prediction request, and identify the most important features for each customer.

Option D is incorrect because using the What-If tool in Google Cloud to determine how your model will perform when individual features are excluded, and ranking the feature importance in order of those that caused the most significant performance drop when removed from the model, is not a practical way to determine which customer attribute has the most predictive power for each prediction served by the model. The What-If tool is a tool that allows you to visualize and analyze your ML models and datasets. However, this method requires manually editing or removing features for each instance, and observing the change in the prediction. This method is not scalable or efficient, and may not capture the interactions between features or the non-linearity of the model.