MS-DS Master of Data science MS-DS Master of Data science Supervised Learning Algorithms Questions and Answers 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which supervised learning algorithm uses the concept of maximum margin to separate classes?
- Support Vector Machine (Correct answer)
- Naive Bayes
- K-Nearest Neighbors
- Logistic Regression
Correct answer: Support Vector Machine
SVMs find the hyperplane that maximizes the margin between the closest data points of different classes.
Question 2: In gradient boosting, what does each subsequent tree attempt to predict?
- The residual errors of the previous model (Correct answer)
- The original target variable
- The feature importances
- The learning rate
Correct answer: The residual errors of the previous model
Each new tree in gradient boosting is trained on the residual errors left by the ensemble of all previous trees.
Question 3: What is the primary assumption of the Naive Bayes classifier?
- Features are conditionally independent given the class label (Correct answer)
- The decision boundary is linear
- All features have equal variance
- The data is normally distributed
Correct answer: Features are conditionally independent given the class label
Naive Bayes assumes that all features are conditionally independent of each other given the class label.
Question 4: Which regularization technique in linear regression can shrink coefficients exactly to zero, enabling feature selection?
- L1 (Lasso) (Correct answer)
- L2 (Ridge)
- Elastic Net
- Dropout
Correct answer: L1 (Lasso)
L1 regularization (Lasso) penalizes the absolute value of coefficients, which can drive some coefficients to exactly zero.
Question 5: What problem does the kernel trick solve in Support Vector Machines?
- It allows SVMs to find non-linear decision boundaries without explicitly mapping to higher dimensions (Correct answer)
- It reduces overfitting by adding a penalty term
- It speeds up training on large datasets
- It handles missing values in the feature space
Correct answer: It allows SVMs to find non-linear decision boundaries without explicitly mapping to higher dimensions
The kernel trick computes dot products in a high-dimensional space without explicitly transforming the data, enabling non-linear classification.
Question 6: In a Random Forest, what technique is used to ensure diversity among individual decision trees?
- Bagging with random feature subsets at each split (Correct answer)
- Boosting with adaptive weights
- Stacking with a meta-learner
- Pruning with cross-validation
Correct answer: Bagging with random feature subsets at each split
Random Forest combines bootstrap aggregating (bagging) with random feature selection at each split to decorrelate the trees.
Which supervised learning algorithm uses the concept of maximum margin to separate classes?