FREE CBDA Sourcing and Analyzing Data Questions and Answers

Question 1

A business data analyst is working for a financial institution to analyze potential credit card fraud. The analyst has access to a large dataset of historical transactions. Which analytical approach would be MOST effective for identifying transactions that are likely to be fraudulent?

Accepted Answer

Predictive Analytics

Answer

Predictive analytics is the most effective approach here because it uses historical data to forecast future outcomes. By building a model based on past fraudulent and non-fraudulent transactions, the analyst can predict the probability that a new transaction is fraudulent. Descriptive analytics would only summarize past fraud, diagnostic would explain why it happened, and prescriptive would suggest actions to take, but prediction is the core need.

Question 2

A business analyst is tasked with understanding customer sentiment regarding a new product feature. They decide to collect data from social media platforms, online reviews, and customer support chat logs. This collection of data from various origins is best described as what?

Accepted Answer

Data Sourcing

Answer

Data sourcing is the process of identifying and gathering data from various internal and external sources to be used for a specific purpose, such as analysis. In this scenario, the analyst is actively gathering data from multiple places (social media, reviews, logs) to analyze customer sentiment.

Question 3

When planning data collection, a business data analyst determines that they need to use both internal sales records and external market trend reports. Which of the following is the primary reason for using multiple data sources?

Accepted Answer

To gain a more comprehensive and accurate view of the business problem

Answer

Combining internal data (like sales records) with external data (like market trends) provides a richer, more complete context for analysis. Internal data shows what is happening within the company, while external data provides insight into the broader industry and economic environment, leading to more robust and reliable conclusions.

Question 4

During the data analysis phase of a project, a data analyst identifies a series of transactions with values that are 100 times larger than any other transaction in the dataset. These data points are best classified as:

Accepted Answer

Outliers

Answer

Outliers are data points that differ significantly from other observations. In this case, transactions that are 100 times larger are extreme deviations from the norm. Identifying and handling outliers is a critical step in data preparation and analysis to ensure they don't skew the results.

Question 5

A data analyst is preparing a dataset for analysis. The 'customer address' column is a single field containing the street, city, state, and zip code. To make the data more useful for geographic analysis, the analyst splits this single column into four separate columns. This activity is a key part of which task?

Accepted Answer

Preparing Data

Answer

Data preparation (also known as data preprocessing or data cleaning) involves transforming raw data into a clean and organized format suitable for analysis. Splitting a combined address field into separate components is a classic example of data preparation, as it structures the data for more effective analysis.

CBDA - Certified Business Data Analyst Practice Test

CBDA - Certified Business Data Analyst Practice Test

FREE CBDA Sourcing and Analyzing Data Questions and Answers