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Final Exam:Machine Learning with Python (IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate) Answers 2025

1. Question 1

SVM multi-class classification strategy?

  • ❌ Combine supervised + unsupervised

  • ❌ One classifier per class

  • ❌ Single combined classifier

  • One classifier per pair of classes (One-vs-One)

Explanation:
Binary SVMs → use One-vs-One for multi-class problems.


2. Question 2

Why use median at leaf nodes with skewed salary data?

  • ❌ Minimizes MSE

  • Reduces impact of extreme values

  • ❌ Mean is inaccurate

  • ❌ Mean is hard to compute

Explanation:
Median is robust against outliers in skewed data.


3. Question 3

Effect of increasing decision tree complexity?

  • Bias decreases, variance increases

  • ❌ Bias increases

  • ❌ Both constant

  • ❌ Both decrease

Explanation:
More complex trees → fit training data better → overfitting.


4. Question 4

Finding unusual transactions?

  • ❌ Predicting trends

  • Identifying patterns that deviate from normal transactions (Anomaly Detection)

  • ❌ Predefined classification

  • ❌ Simple grouping

Explanation:
Goal = detect outliers/anomalies.


5. Question 5

Productivity increases → slows → stabilizes. Best regression?

  • ❌ Exponential

  • ❌ Logarithmic

  • Polynomial regression

  • ❌ Linear

Explanation:
Nonlinear curve with rise → plateau → polynomial fits well.


6. Question 6

Binary classification based on proximity?

  • ❌ Logistic regression

  • ❌ Decision tree

  • K-nearest neighbors (KNN)

  • ❌ SVM

Explanation:
KNN classifies based on nearest neighbors.


7. Question 7

Advantage of PCA before clustering?

  • Transforms into high-variance principal axes revealing key features

  • ❌ Removes all unimportant features

  • ❌ Automatically segments

  • ❌ Reduces to one component

Explanation:
PCA keeps maximum variance directions → simplifies clustering.


8. Question 8

Faster alternative to gradient descent for large datasets?

  • ❌ Backpropagation

  • ❌ Grid search

  • ❌ Least squares

  • Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)

Explanation:
SGD updates weights using small batches → much faster.


9. Question 9

Model misclassifies loyal customers as churn risks — fix?

  • ❌ PCA

  • ❌ Use SVM

  • ❌ Add more churn data

  • Adjust the classification threshold

Explanation:
Shifting threshold reduces false positives.


10. Question 10

Start with each customer as its own cluster → merge upward?

  • ❌ Density-based

  • ❌ Divisive

  • Agglomerative clustering

  • ❌ Partition-based

Explanation:
Agglomerative = bottom-up clustering.


11. Question 11

Why is DBSCAN ideal?

  • ❌ Daily travel routines

  • ❌ Forecast purchase trends

  • ❌ Satellite green cover

  • To isolate rare sensor events in IoT data

Explanation:
DBSCAN excels at detecting outliers/anomalies.


12. Question 12

Preserve local AND global structure in high-dimensional data?

  • ❌ PCA

  • UMAP

  • ❌ Dimensionality reduction not used

  • ❌ t-SNE

Explanation:
UMAP preserves both local + global structure better than t-SNE.


13. Question 13

Tool for visualizing ML insights?

  • ❌ Pandas

  • Matplotlib

  • ❌ Scikit-learn

  • ❌ NumPy

Explanation:
Matplotlib is the core Python visualization library.


14. Question 14

How is ML different from traditional programming?

  • ❌ Writes code faster

  • ❌ Generates random rules

  • Learns from data to make predictions

  • ❌ Hand-coded trees

Explanation:
ML learns patterns instead of using explicit rules.


15. Question 15

Library for matrix operations and linear algebra?

  • ❌ Scikit-learn

  • ❌ Pandas

  • ❌ Matplotlib

  • NumPy

Explanation:
NumPy = fast vectorized operations + linear algebra.


🧾 Summary Table

Q# Correct Answer Key Concept
1 One-vs-One SVM multi-class
2 Median reduces impact of outliers Skewed data
3 Bias ↓, Variance ↑ Overfitting trees
4 Detect unusual transactions Anomaly detection
5 Polynomial regression Nonlinear productivity curve
6 KNN Proximity-based classification
7 PCA finds variance-rich axes Dimensionality reduction
8 SGD Fast optimization
9 Adjust threshold Reduce false positives
10 Agglomerative Hierarchical clustering
11 Isolate rare sensor events DBSCAN
12 UMAP Preserve local + global structure
13 Matplotlib Visualization
14 Learns from data ML vs Programming
15 NumPy Matrix & algebra operations