ISYE 6501 - MIDTERM 1 QUESTIONS WITH THE BEST ANSWERS 2025

ISYE 6501 - MIDTERM 1 QUESTIONS WITH THE BEST
ANSWERS 2025

What do descriptive questions ask? - Correct Answer-What happened? (e.g., which
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customers are most alike)
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What do predictive questions ask? - Correct Answer-What will happen? (e.g., what will
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Google's stock price be?)
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What do prescriptive questions ask? - Correct Answer-What action(s) would be best?
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(e.g., where to put traffic lights)
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What is a model? - Correct Answer-Real-life situation expressed as math.
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What do classifiers help you do? - Correct Answer-differentiate
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What is a soft classifier and when is it used? - Correct Answer-In some cases, there won't
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be a line that separates all of the labeled examples. So we use a classifier that minimizes
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the number of mistakes.
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What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the vertical
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x-axis? - Correct Answer-The horizontal attribute is all that is needed.
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What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the
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horizontal y-axis? - Correct Answer-The vertical attribute is all that is needed.
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What is time-series data? - Correct Answer-The same data recorded over time often
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recorded at equal intervals
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What is quantitative data? - Correct Answer-Number with a meaning: higher means
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more, lower means less (e.g., age, sales, temperature, income)
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,What is categorical data? - Correct Answer-Numbers w/o meaning (e.g., zip codes), non-
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numeric (e.g., hair color), binary data (e.g., male/female, yes/no, on/off)
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Which of these is time series data? d. d. d. d. d. d.




A. The average cost of a house in the United States every year since 1820
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B. The height of each professional basketball player in the NBA at the start of the season -
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Correct Answer-A
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Which of these is structured data? d. d. d. d. d.




A. The contents of a person's Twitter feed
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B. The amount of money in a person's bank account - Correct Answer-B
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What is structured data? - Correct Answer-Data that can be stores in a structured way
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What is unstructured data? - Correct Answer-Data that is not easily described and
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stored (e.g., written text)
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A survey of 25 people recorded each person's family size and type of car. Which of these
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is a data point?
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A. The 14th person's family size and car type
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B. The 14th person's family size
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C. The car type of each person - Correct Answer-A.
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A data point is all the information about one observation
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The farther the wrongly classified point is from the line ___ - Correct Answer-The bigger
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the mistake we've made
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The term including the margin gets larger so the importance of a large margin out weights
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avoiding mistakes and classifying known data samples
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. - Correct Answer-As lambda gets larger
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That term also drops towards zero, so the importance of minimizing mistakes and
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classifying known data points outweighs having a large margin.
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, d. - Correct Answer-As lambda drops towards zero
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What can svms be used for - Correct Answer-to find a classifier with maximum
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separation or margin between the two sets of points?
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When to use SVM? - Correct Answer-If it's impossible to avoid classification errors, SVM
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can find a classifier that trades off reducing errors and enlarging the margin.
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Error for data point j d. d. d. d. d.




- Correct Answer-What does this formula describe?
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Total error d.




d. - Correct Answer-What does this formula describe ?
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To maximize the distance between the two lines what do we need to minimize? - Correct
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Answer-
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M_j > 1 - Correct Answer-What value do we give for more costly errors
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