AI0-001 Machine Learning and Deep Learning — 10 Questions

Question 1

A data scientist is building a classification model to detect fraudulent transactions. The dataset is highly imbalanced with only 1% fraudulent cases. Which approach should the scientist use to evaluate model performance most effectively?

Accepted Answer

F1 score. In highly imbalanced datasets like fraud detection (1% positive class), accuracy is misleading because a model that predicts all transactions as legitimate would achieve 99% accuracy yet fail to detect any fraud. The F1 score (harmonic mean of precision and recall) is the most effective metric because it balances both false positives and false negatives, providing a single score that reflects the model's ability to correctly identify the minority class without being skewed by class imbalance.

Answer

Accuracy

Answer

Recall

Answer

Precision

Question 2

A machine learning team is deploying a model that predicts customer churn. They notice that the model's predictions are highly sensitive to small changes in input features, leading to inconsistent outputs. Which technique should the team apply to improve model stability?

Accepted Answer

Regularization. Regularization (Option C) is the correct technique because it adds a penalty term to the loss function (e.g., L1 or L2 regularization), which constrains the model's weights. This reduces variance and prevents overfitting to noise in the training data, directly addressing the high sensitivity to small input changes (brittleness). By shrinking coefficients, regularization forces the model to learn more general patterns, improving stability and consistency in predictions.

Answer

Increase learning rate

Answer

Feature scaling

Answer

Cross-validation

Question 3

A deep learning model for image classification is overfitting the training data. The team has already tried data augmentation and dropout. Which additional technique should they implement to reduce overfitting?

Accepted Answer

Early stopping. Early stopping (Option D) is the correct additional technique because it halts training when validation performance stops improving, directly preventing the model from memorizing noise in the training data. Since data augmentation and dropout are already in use, early stopping provides a complementary regularization effect by limiting the number of training iterations before overfitting occurs.

Answer

Batch normalization

Answer

Increase number of epochs

Answer

Gradient clipping

Question 4

A company wants to deploy a machine learning model that requires continuous learning as new data arrives. The model must be able to adapt to changing patterns without retraining from scratch. Which approach should be used?

Accepted Answer

Online learning. Online learning (also called incremental learning) updates the model incrementally as each new data point arrives, without requiring full retraining. This makes it ideal for scenarios where data arrives continuously and patterns shift over time, as the model can adapt its parameters on the fly.

Answer

Transfer learning

Answer

Batch learning

Answer

Unsupervised learning

Question 5

A data engineer is designing a pipeline to train a linear regression model on a dataset with 10 million rows and 50 features. The dataset fits in memory. Which approach should the engineer use to train the model efficiently?

Accepted Answer

Stochastic gradient descent. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the most efficient approach for training a linear regression model on a dataset with 10 million rows and 50 features because it updates the model parameters using only one training example per iteration, leading to much faster convergence per epoch compared to batch methods. Since the dataset fits in memory, SGD can still be implemented efficiently without the overhead of loading data in batches from disk, and it scales well to large datasets where the normal equation or batch gradient descent would be computationally prohibitive.

Answer

Normal equation

Answer

Batch gradient descent

Answer

Principal component analysis

Question 6

A data scientist is training a convolutional neural network (CNN) for object detection. The training loss decreases rapidly but then plateaus at a high value, and the validation loss starts increasing. Which action should the scientist take to improve the model?

Accepted Answer

Reduce the model complexity. The training loss decreasing rapidly then plateauing at a high value while validation loss increases is classic overfitting. Reducing model complexity (Option C) directly addresses overfitting by decreasing the number of parameters or applying regularization (e.g., dropout, L2), which forces the network to learn more generalizable features rather than memorizing noise in the training data.

Answer

Increase the learning rate

Answer

Increase the number of epochs

Answer

Add more convolutional layers

Question 7

A team is building a recommendation system using collaborative filtering. They have a sparse user-item matrix. Which technique should they use to handle the sparsity and improve recommendations?

Accepted Answer

Matrix factorization. Matrix factorization (B) is the correct technique because it decomposes the sparse user-item matrix into lower-dimensional latent factor matrices, effectively capturing underlying patterns and filling in missing entries. This directly addresses sparsity by learning dense representations that generalize beyond observed interactions, which is a core strength in collaborative filtering for recommendation systems.

Answer

Association rule mining

Answer

k-nearest neighbors

Answer

Content-based filtering

Question 8

Which TWO techniques are commonly used to handle missing data in a machine learning dataset? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Imputation with mean or median. Imputation with mean or median is a standard technique for handling missing numerical data because it preserves the dataset size and avoids introducing bias from simply discarding rows. By replacing missing values with the central tendency of the observed data, the model can still learn patterns without losing information, though it may reduce variance slightly.

Answer

Normalization

Answer

One-hot encoding

Answer

Dimensionality reduction

Question 9

Which THREE are common activation functions used in neural networks? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

ReLU. ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit) is a common activation function in neural networks because it introduces non-linearity while being computationally efficient. It outputs the input directly if positive, otherwise zero, which helps mitigate the vanishing gradient problem compared to sigmoid or tanh. This makes it a default choice for hidden layers in many deep learning architectures.

Answer

Softmax

Answer

Linear

Question 10

Which TWO are valid techniques to reduce overfitting in a deep neural network? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

L2 regularization. L2 regularization (option C) is a valid technique to reduce overfitting by adding a penalty term proportional to the square of the weight magnitudes to the loss function. This discourages the network from learning overly complex patterns, effectively shrinking weights and improving generalization. Dropout (option E) randomly drops a fraction of neurons during training, which prevents co-adaptation of features and forces the network to learn more robust representations, also reducing overfitting.

Answer

Increase batch size

Answer

Increase learning rate

Answer

Gradient clipping