A data analyst at an e-commerce company wants to build a machine learning model to predict customer lifetime spending using tabular transaction data stored in BigQuery. The analyst needs to follow the standard machine learning lifecycle directly within the data warehouse using SQL statements. Which sequence of BigQuery ML SQL statements correctly follows the end-to-end lifecycle to train the model, assess its regression performance metrics (such as Mean Squared Error), and generate predictions on new customer records?

Execute `CREATE MODEL` to train the model, run `ML.EVALUATE` to analyze evaluation metrics, and run `ML.PREDICT` to generate predictions on new data.: ### **What the standard BigQuery ML workflow is** **BigQuery ML (BQML)** allows data professionals to build, operationalize, and manage machine learning models directly inside Google BigQuery using standard SQL queries. This avoids the latency and complexity of exporting large datasets to external machine learning frameworks. ### **How it meets all requirements:** - **Model Training (`CREATE MODEL`)**: Defines the model type (such as `linear_reg` or `boosted_tree_regressor`), target label, and feature columns to train the model on data stored in BigQuery tables. - **Performance Evaluation (`ML.EVALUATE`)**: Evaluates the trained model against test data to calculate statistical metrics such as **Mean Squared Error (MSE)**, **Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)**, Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and R-squared for regression tasks. - **Prediction Generation (`ML.PREDICT`)**: Applies the trained model to new or unseen feature data to generate predicted values directly in SQL query results. ### **Key advantages of BigQuery ML:** - **SQL Familiarity**: Data analysts can train and use machine learning models using standard SQL syntax without deep Python or specialized ML library knowledge. - **Zero Data Movement**: Training and inference execute directly within BigQuery's scalable, distributed infrastructure, improving security and performance. - **Automated Preprocessing**: Automatically handles one-hot encoding for categorical variables and feature scaling for numerical inputs. - **Built-in Model Evaluation**: Standardized evaluation functions (`ML.EVALUATE`) automatically compute appropriate metrics based on model type. ### **Why this is optimal:** Following the sequence of **`CREATE MODEL` → `ML.EVALUATE` → `ML.PREDICT`** represents the canonical, Google-recommended pattern for executing the standard ML project lifecycle inside BigQuery ML.