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Graded Quiz: Building Unsupervised Learning Models :Machine Learning with Python (IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate) Answers 2025

1. Question 1

Why run an unsupervised model first with no diagnosis labels?

  • ❌ Rank patients by admission time

  • ❌ Compress features into one index

  • ❌ Assign diagnosis codes automatically

  • To uncover natural patient groups that share similar vital sign patterns

Explanation:
Unsupervised learning finds hidden structures when no labels exist — perfect for grouping patients by similarity.


2. Question 2

How does hierarchical clustering help determine the number of clusters?

  • Visualizes similarity levels using a dendrogram to help choose optimal cluster count

  • ❌ Produces same clusters every time

  • ❌ Automatically removes outliers

  • ❌ Designed specifically for high-dimensional data

Explanation:
A dendrogram shows where clusters merge, helping select the right number of groups.


3. Question 3

What does a K-means centroid represent?

  • ❌ Range of spending

  • ❌ Distance between customer and center

  • ❌ Number of customers improving

  • The coordinate pair representing the average spend and purchase frequency

Explanation:
A centroid = mean position of all points in a cluster.


4. Question 4

Why is DBSCAN good for detecting unusual social media activity?

  • ❌ Need exact number of clusters

  • It finds clusters of any shape and detects outliers

  • ❌ Assigns every user to a cluster

  • ❌ Minimizes user-center distances

Explanation:
DBSCAN naturally identifies dense groups and marks isolated points as anomalies.


5. Question 5

Why use t-SNE for 2D scatterplots of customer behavior?

  • ❌ Label each segment automatically

  • ❌ Enforce linear projections

  • ❌ Equal distance between points

  • Maintain neighborhood similarities for visual discovery

Explanation:
t-SNE preserves local structure, making clusters visually meaningful.


6. Question 6

Why is PCA suitable for environmental research?

  • ❌ Finds nonlinear relationships

  • ❌ Combines all variables into one

  • ❌ Forces uncorrelated features

  • Reduces data to key components for simpler analysis

Explanation:
PCA highlights the most important variance directions, simplifying analysis with fewer features.


7. Question 7

Advantage of using t-SNE for app user interaction visualization?

  • ❌ Eliminates noise

  • ❌ Guarantees linear transformation

  • Allows similar users to form clusters in low-dimensional space

  • ❌ Reduces to one dimension

Explanation:
t-SNE produces meaningful cluster structures for visualizing high-dimensional behavioral patterns.


🧾 Summary Table

Q# Correct Answer Key Concept
1 Uncover natural patient groups Unsupervised learning
2 Dendrogram helps choose clusters Hierarchical clustering
3 Centroid = average values K-means
4 Finds shapes & detects outliers DBSCAN
5 Preserves neighborhood structure t-SNE
6 Reduce to key components PCA
7 Similar users cluster in low-D space t-SNE visualization