Unit 13: Machine learning - Practice Quiz

ECAP776 60 Questions
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1 What is machine learning?

Introduction Easy
A. A language designed for creating web page layouts
B. A system that stores files without processing them
C. A method used only to repair computer hardware
D. A method that enables computers to learn patterns from data

2 What is the main purpose of training a machine learning model?

Introduction Easy
A. To learn useful patterns from available data
B. To convert every program into machine code
C. To increase the physical size of memory
D. To delete incorrect files from a computer

3 What is a machine learning model?

Introduction Easy
A. A learned representation used to make predictions
B. A physical device used to collect data
C. A network cable connecting two computers
D. A spreadsheet containing only empty cells

4 Which data is used to teach a machine learning model?

Introduction Easy
A. Archive data
B. Display data
C. Training data
D. Backup data

5 In machine learning, what is a feature?

Introduction Easy
A. A final score assigned after testing
B. A password required to open a dataset
C. An input characteristic used by a model
D. A hardware component inside a processor

6 What is a label in a labeled dataset?

Introduction Easy
A. The known answer linked to an example
B. The number of columns in the dataset
C. The location where the dataset is stored
D. The program used to open the dataset

7 Why is test data used in machine learning?

Introduction Easy
A. To replace the model with a database
B. To evaluate the model on unseen examples
C. To translate Python into another language
D. To increase the computer's screen size

8 Which Python library is commonly used for basic machine learning tasks?

Introduction Easy
A. Turtle
B. scikit-learn
C. Tkinter
D. Pygame

9 What does a prediction represent in machine learning?

Introduction Easy
A. The folder containing the Python program
B. The process of installing a software package
C. The physical connection between two devices
D. The output produced by a trained model

10 Which example is a common application of machine learning?

Introduction Easy
A. Changing a keyboard's physical layout
B. Detecting spam in incoming email messages
C. Printing the same fixed sentence repeatedly
D. Connecting a monitor with a video cable

11 Which type of machine learning uses labeled training data?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Unsupervised learning
B. Random learning
C. Supervised learning
D. Reinforcement learning

12 Which type of machine learning discovers patterns in unlabeled data?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Reinforcement learning
B. Unsupervised learning
C. Manual learning
D. Supervised learning

13 In which type of machine learning does an agent learn through rewards and penalties?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Supervised learning
B. Unsupervised learning
C. Reinforcement learning
D. Sequential searching

14 Which task predicts a category such as "spam" or "not spam"?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Regression
B. Compression
C. Clustering
D. Classification

15 Which task predicts a continuous numerical value such as a house price?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Association
B. Clustering
C. Regression
D. Classification

16 Which task groups similar data items without using known labels?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Clustering
B. Regression
C. Classification
D. Prediction

17 Predicting whether a student will pass or fail is an example of which task?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Regression
B. Classification
C. Clustering
D. Sorting

18 Grouping customers by similar purchasing behavior is an example of which task?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Calculation
B. Regression
C. Clustering
D. Classification

19 A robot learning to move by receiving points for successful actions uses which type of learning?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Supervised learning
B. Unsupervised learning
C. Database learning
D. Reinforcement learning

20 Predicting tomorrow's temperature as a number is an example of which task?

Types of machine learning Easy
A. Classification
B. Association
C. Clustering
D. Regression

21 A house-price model performs very well on its training data but poorly on newly collected houses. Which problem does this most strongly indicate?

Introduction Medium
A. Underfitting
B. Feature extraction
C. Overfitting
D. Data normalization

22 A dataset contains customer age, annual income, and whether each customer repaid a loan. When predicting repayment, what is the role of annual income?

Introduction Medium
A. A loss value
B. A prediction
C. A feature
D. A label

23 Why should a test dataset normally remain separate from the data used to train a model?

Introduction Medium
A. To ensure every feature has the same value
B. To repeatedly adjust the model until it memorizes all available examples
C. To estimate performance on unseen examples
D. To increase the number of model parameters

24 A company trains a model using emails already labeled as "spam" or "not spam." Which type of machine learning is being used?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Unsupervised learning
B. Supervised learning
C. Self-organizing learning
D. Reinforcement learning

25 A retailer groups customers according to purchasing behavior without providing predefined customer categories. Which approach is most appropriate?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Classification
B. Reinforcement learning
C. Regression
D. Clustering

26 An agent learns to navigate a maze by receiving a positive score at the exit and penalties for collisions. Which learning type does this illustrate?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Supervised learning
B. Unsupervised learning
C. Reinforcement learning
D. Dimensionality reduction

27 A medical dataset records patient temperature in Celsius and body weight in kilograms. Why might feature scaling be useful before training some models?

Introduction Medium
A. It converts all inputs into target labels
B. It gives features comparable numerical ranges
C. It guarantees that the resulting model will achieve perfect accuracy on future patients
D. It removes every incorrect record

28 Which task is an example of supervised regression?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Grouping articles by similarity
B. Assigning photos to unlabeled clusters
C. Choosing actions from rewards
D. Predicting tomorrow's temperature

29 Which task is best formulated as supervised classification?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Determining whether a transaction is fraudulent
B. Compressing many features into two numerical dimensions while preserving as much variation as possible
C. Grouping songs without genre labels
D. Predicting a car's selling price

30 A model achieves an accuracy of on 500 test examples. Approximately how many examples did it classify correctly?

Introduction Medium
A. 420
B. 336
C. 484
D. 400

31 Which change is most likely to improve a model that underfits both its training data and validation data?

Introduction Medium
A. Evaluate only on training data
B. Remove most training examples
C. Replace the validation labels with the model's own predictions before measuring performance
D. Use a more expressive model

32 A column containing unique student identification numbers is included when predicting exam performance. Why might this column be removed?

Introduction Medium
A. It always contains missing numerical values
B. It is necessarily the target being predicted
C. It is usually not a meaningful predictive feature
D. It automatically transforms the problem from supervised learning into reinforcement learning

33 A school has 10,000 student records, but only 800 have been labeled as "at risk" or "not at risk." Which learning approach is designed to use both sets?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Hierarchical clustering
B. Semi-supervised learning
C. Reinforcement learning
D. Pure supervised learning

34 A model learns useful image representations by predicting hidden portions of unlabeled images before being adapted to classify objects. What approach is this?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Reinforcement learning
B. Self-supervised learning
C. Standard clustering
D. Fully supervised regression using manually supplied continuous labels for every image

35 During model development, what is the primary purpose of a validation set?

Introduction Medium
A. To replace all training examples
B. To store deployed predictions
C. To select model settings
D. To provide the final unbiased performance report after being checked repeatedly during development

36 Two input features contain the same information: age in years and age in months. What concern does this create?

Introduction Medium
A. The task changes into clustering
B. The labels become unsupervised
C. The features are strongly redundant
D. The test set automatically becomes larger

37 A streaming service must recommend an item, observe whether the user engages with it, and adapt future recommendations. Which framework best captures this repeated interaction?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Dimensionality reduction followed by a fixed rule that never responds to user feedback
B. Static clustering
C. Supervised regression
D. Reinforcement learning

38 Which statement correctly distinguishes classification from clustering?

Types of machine learning Medium
A. Classification requires rewards; clustering requires penalties
B. Classification always uses fewer records than clustering because every category must contain one example
C. Classification uses known categories; clustering discovers groups
D. Classification predicts numbers; clustering predicts known labels

39 A fraud dataset contains 9,900 legitimate transactions and 100 fraudulent transactions. A model predicts every transaction as legitimate. Why is its accuracy misleading?

Introduction Medium
A. It was necessarily trained without labels
B. It proves that accuracy can only be used when both classes contain exactly the same number of records
C. It fails to identify any fraudulent transactions
D. It uses too many numerical features

40 A trained model receives a new customer's attributes and outputs a churn probability. What is this use of the trained model called?

Introduction Medium
A. Hyperparameter tuning
B. Inference
C. Clustering
D. Labeling

41 A team evaluates 100 model configurations on the same validation set and reports the configuration with the highest validation accuracy as its final performance. Even though no model was trained on that validation set, why is the reported accuracy likely optimistic?

Introduction Hard
A. Training without validation examples causes underfitting
B. Repeated selection has indirectly overfit the validation set
C. The configurations necessarily share identical parameters
D. Validation accuracy is always higher than test accuracy

42 A dataset contains 500 labeled radiographs and 50,000 unlabeled radiographs. A model first learns representations by predicting masked regions in all images and is then fine-tuned using the 500 labels. Which description is most precise?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Supervised pretraining followed by unsupervised clustering
B. Reinforcement learning followed by transductive inference
C. Semi-supervised clustering followed by active learning with repeated expert queries
D. Self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning

43 A binary classifier is evaluated on a population where the positive class prevalence changes from during testing to after deployment, while both and the decision threshold remain unchanged. Which metric is guaranteed to remain unchanged in expectation?

Introduction Hard
A. Precision
B. Negative predictive value
C. Accuracy
D. Recall

44 An agent observes a context, chooses one advertisement, and immediately receives a click or no-click reward. Its action does not affect the next context. What is the most specific learning formulation?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Full sequential reinforcement learning
B. Unsupervised density estimation
C. Contextual bandit learning
D. Supervised learning with fixed labels collected independently of the policy

45 A regression problem follows , where and . With squared-error loss and unlimited representative data, what prevents the expected prediction error for from reaching zero?

Introduction Hard
A. The use of continuous target values
B. The irreducible conditional noise
C. The absence of a classification threshold
D. The model's inability to reproduce every training example exactly

46 A learner receives the complete unlabeled test feature set together with labeled training data. It may tailor predictions jointly to those particular test points but is not required to produce a rule for future points. Which setting is this?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Online reinforcement learning
B. Inductive learning
C. Self-supervised representation learning over an indefinitely expanding population
D. Transductive learning

47 A fraud detector has excellent cross-validation results, but transaction records from the same customer appear in both training and validation folds. The deployment goal is prediction for entirely new customers. Which correction best aligns validation with deployment?

Introduction Hard
A. Balance fraud prevalence independently inside every randomly formed record-level fold
B. Split records by customer identity
C. Remove all customer-level features
D. Increase the number of randomly generated folds

48 A clustering algorithm groups customer records without labels. Analysts later assign business names to the clusters after inspecting them. How should the algorithm's original training be classified?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Semi-supervised, because humans interpreted its output
B. Reinforcement-based, because analysts accepted or rejected the discovered customer groups
C. Supervised, because the final clusters receive names
D. Unsupervised, because no target labels guided fitting

49 Suppose training and deployment satisfy but . What kind of distribution change is this?

Introduction Hard
A. Concept drift
B. Label shift
C. A change in the annotation policy that alters both class definitions and conditional outcomes
D. Covariate shift

50 A spam filter asks a human to label only the emails for which its current prediction is most uncertain, then retrains on the expanded labeled set. Which paradigm primarily describes this label-acquisition strategy?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Active learning
B. Reinforcement learning with a long-horizon reward assigned after every labeling campaign
C. Transfer learning
D. Unsupervised learning

51 A model attains zero training error after unique identification numbers are included as numeric features. Why does this result alone provide almost no evidence of useful learning?

Introduction Hard
A. Identification numbers may enable memorization without transferable structure
B. Zero training error proves that regularization was excessive
C. Numeric features cannot represent categorical identifiers
D. Any feature unique to each observation forces every possible learning algorithm to predict randomly on deployment data

52 A model predicts whether each image contains any of the labels {car, pedestrian, bicycle}, allowing several labels to be true simultaneously. Which task type is most precise?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Ordinal regression
B. Multi-label classification
C. Multiclass classification
D. Structured reinforcement learning in which each object label represents an available action

53 A feature-standardization transform is fitted once using the entire dataset and then cross-validation is performed on the transformed data. What is the central methodological error?

Introduction Hard
A. Standardization changes regression into classification
B. Cross-validation requires all features to remain unscaled
C. The transform guarantees that each validation fold has exactly zero mean and unit variance independently
D. The transform exposes validation-fold statistics during training

54 Which statement correctly relates online learning and supervised learning?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Every online method must update exactly once per example and permanently discard all previous parameters
B. Supervised learning is online only when it uses reinforcement rewards
C. Online learning can be supervised when labeled examples arrive sequentially
D. They are mutually exclusive because online learning has no labels

55 Two models have identical average test accuracy. Model A is correct on nearly all examples from one subgroup and poor on another, while Model B performs moderately on both. What follows logically from the identical average?

Introduction Hard
A. Their subgroup error rates must also be identical
B. Model A necessarily has lower variance than Model B
C. Their deployment consequences may still differ substantially
D. Model B is guaranteed to be optimal under every possible operational cost matrix

56 A neural network is trained to distinguish real samples from generated samples while another network learns to generate samples that fool it. No human class labels are used. Which description best fits the overall task?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Contextual bandit optimization
B. Semi-supervised discriminative learning because the real and generated indicators constitute permanent human-provided target classes
C. Supervised multiclass classification
D. Unsupervised generative learning

57 Under the no-free-lunch principle, why can no learning algorithm be universally superior over all possible prediction problems?

Introduction Hard
A. Generalization becomes impossible whenever labels contain noise
B. Any advantage relies on assumptions about the problem distribution
C. All algorithms produce identical models on finite datasets
D. Every universally consistent learner must have the same finite-sample error on each individual dataset

58 A robot receives a reward only after completing a 30-action assembly sequence. Which issue is characteristic of reinforcement learning and is not captured by ordinary independently labeled supervised examples?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Feature scaling across numeric inputs
B. Class balancing across target categories
C. Credit assignment across earlier actions
D. Selecting a deterministic train-test split that preserves every action sequence in both partitions

59 A classifier is trained from labels produced by several imperfect heuristics rather than directly verified human annotations. The heuristics sometimes conflict. Which paradigm most specifically describes the supervision source?

Types of machine learning Hard
A. Weak supervision
B. Pure unsupervised learning
C. Self-supervised learning in which every heuristic label is guaranteed to be a deterministic transformation of the raw input
D. On-policy reinforcement learning

60 Before cross-validation, an analyst applies PCA to all available feature vectors without using target labels. Why can this still invalidate the estimated generalization performance?

Introduction Hard
A. PCA necessarily removes the target-predictive directions
B. PCA is supervised whenever evaluation labels exist
C. Validation features influenced the learned projection
D. Cross-validation permits dimensionality reduction only when every original feature is statistically independent