ISYE 6501 - Midterm 1
Questions and Answers
Denning [Date] [Course title]
,What do descriptive questions ask? - Correct Answers:s :What happened? (e.g., which customers are
most alike)
What do predictive questions ask? - Correct Answers:s :What will happen? (e.g., what will Google's stock
price be?)
What do prescriptive questions ask? - Correct Answers:s :What action(s) would be best? (e.g., where to
put traffic lights)
What is a model? - Correct Answers:s :Real-life situation expressed as math.
What do classifiers help you do? - Correct Answers:s :differentiate
What is a soft classifier and when is it used? - Correct Answers:s :In some cases, there won't be a line
that separates all of the labeled examples. So we use a classifier that minimizes the number of mistakes.
What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the vertical x-axis? -
Correct Answers:s :The horizontal attribute is all that is needed.
What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the horizontal y-axis? -
Correct Answers:s :The vertical attribute is all that is needed.
What is time-series data? - Correct Answers:s :The same data recorded over time often recorded at
equal intervals
What is quantitative data? - Correct Answers:s :Number with a meaning: higher means more, lower
means less (e.g., age, sales, temperature, income)
What is categorical data? - Correct Answers:s :Numbers w/o meaning (e.g., zip codes), non-numeric
(e.g., hair color), binary data (e.g., male/female, yes/no, on/off)
Which of these is time series data?
, A. The average cost of a house in the United States every year since 1820
B. The height of each professional basketball player in the NBA at the start of the season - Correct
Answers:s :A
Which of these is structured data?
A. The contents of a person's Twitter feed
B. The amount of money in a person's bank account - Correct Answers:s :B
What is structured data? - Correct Answers:s :Data that can be stores in a structured way
What is unstructured data? - Correct Answers:s :Data that is not easily described and stored (e.g.,
written text)
A survey of 25 people recorded each person's family size and type of car. Which of these is a data point?
A. The 14th person's family size and car type
B. The 14th person's family size
C.The car type of each person - Correct Answers:s :A.
A data point is all the information about one observation
The farther the wrongly classified point is from the line ___ - Correct Answers:s :The bigger the mistake
we've made
The term including the margin gets larger so the importance of a large margin out weights avoiding
mistakes and classifying known data samples. - Correct Answers:s :As lambda gets larger
That term also drops towards zero, so the importance of minimizing mistakes and classifying known data
points outweighs having a large margin. - Correct Answers:s :As lambda drops towards zero
What can SVMs be used for - Correct Answers:s :to find a classifier with maximum seperation or margin
between the two sets of points?
Questions and Answers
Denning [Date] [Course title]
,What do descriptive questions ask? - Correct Answers:s :What happened? (e.g., which customers are
most alike)
What do predictive questions ask? - Correct Answers:s :What will happen? (e.g., what will Google's stock
price be?)
What do prescriptive questions ask? - Correct Answers:s :What action(s) would be best? (e.g., where to
put traffic lights)
What is a model? - Correct Answers:s :Real-life situation expressed as math.
What do classifiers help you do? - Correct Answers:s :differentiate
What is a soft classifier and when is it used? - Correct Answers:s :In some cases, there won't be a line
that separates all of the labeled examples. So we use a classifier that minimizes the number of mistakes.
What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the vertical x-axis? -
Correct Answers:s :The horizontal attribute is all that is needed.
What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the horizontal y-axis? -
Correct Answers:s :The vertical attribute is all that is needed.
What is time-series data? - Correct Answers:s :The same data recorded over time often recorded at
equal intervals
What is quantitative data? - Correct Answers:s :Number with a meaning: higher means more, lower
means less (e.g., age, sales, temperature, income)
What is categorical data? - Correct Answers:s :Numbers w/o meaning (e.g., zip codes), non-numeric
(e.g., hair color), binary data (e.g., male/female, yes/no, on/off)
Which of these is time series data?
, A. The average cost of a house in the United States every year since 1820
B. The height of each professional basketball player in the NBA at the start of the season - Correct
Answers:s :A
Which of these is structured data?
A. The contents of a person's Twitter feed
B. The amount of money in a person's bank account - Correct Answers:s :B
What is structured data? - Correct Answers:s :Data that can be stores in a structured way
What is unstructured data? - Correct Answers:s :Data that is not easily described and stored (e.g.,
written text)
A survey of 25 people recorded each person's family size and type of car. Which of these is a data point?
A. The 14th person's family size and car type
B. The 14th person's family size
C.The car type of each person - Correct Answers:s :A.
A data point is all the information about one observation
The farther the wrongly classified point is from the line ___ - Correct Answers:s :The bigger the mistake
we've made
The term including the margin gets larger so the importance of a large margin out weights avoiding
mistakes and classifying known data samples. - Correct Answers:s :As lambda gets larger
That term also drops towards zero, so the importance of minimizing mistakes and classifying known data
points outweighs having a large margin. - Correct Answers:s :As lambda drops towards zero
What can SVMs be used for - Correct Answers:s :to find a classifier with maximum seperation or margin
between the two sets of points?
