MLS-C01 Exploratory Data Analysis Practice Question
A data scientist needs to understand the distribution of a continuous variable in a large dataset stored in Amazon S3. Which AWS service is most appropriate for quickly generating summary statistics and visualizations?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight is a business analytics service that easily connects to S3 data to create interactive visualizations, dashboards, and summary statistics like histograms, making it ideal for this task. Amazon Athena is a query service for running SQL on S3, but it does not generate visualizations. Amazon SageMaker Studio is a machine learning IDE for building and training models, not for quick ad-hoc analysis. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service for ETL, not for analysis or visualization.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Glue
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: Glue is for ETL jobs, not for interactive data exploration.
- ✗
Amazon Athena
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: Athena is a query service but lacks built-in visualization capabilities.
- ✓
Amazon QuickSight
Why this is correct
Correct: QuickSight can directly connect to S3 and create interactive dashboards with summary statistics.
- ✗
Amazon SageMaker Studio
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect: SageMaker Studio is for ML model development, not quick data exploration.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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