NPTEL Online Certification Courses Indian

Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Introduction to
Machine Learning
Assignment- Week 1
TYPE OF QUESTION: MCQ
Number of questions: 10 Total mark: 10 X 2 = 20

MCQ Question
QUESTION 1:

Which of the following is not a type of supervised learning?

A. Classification
B. Regression
C. Clustering
D. None of the above

Correct Answer: C. Clustering

Detailed Solution : Classification and Regression are both supervised learning as they need
class labels or target values for training, but Clustering doesn't need target values.

______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 2:
As the amount of training data increases
A. Training error usually decreases and generalization error usually increases
B. Training error usually decreases and generalization error usually decreases
C. Training error usually increases and generalization error usually decreases
D. Training error usually increases and generalization error usually increases

Correct Answer: A. Training error usually decreases and generalization error usually
increases

Detailed Solution: When the training data increases, the decision boundary becomes very
complex to fit the data. So, the generalization capability usually reduces with the increase in
training data.
______________________________________________________________________________
 QUESTION 3:
Suppose I have 10,000 emails in my mailbox out of which 300 are spams. The spam detection
system detects 150 mails as spams, out of which 50 are actually spams. What is the
precision and recall of my spam detection system ?

A. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 16.66%

B. Precision = 25%, Recall = 33.33%
C. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 75%
D. Precision = 75%, Recall = 33.33%

Correct Answer: A. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 16.66%

Detailed Solution:
𝑇𝑝 50 50
Precision = 𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝
= 50+100
= 150
= 33. 33%

𝑇𝑝 50
Recall = 𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑛
= 50+250
= 16. 66%

______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 4:

Which of the following are not classification tasks ?

A. Find the gender of a person by analyzing his writing style

B. Predict the price of a house based on floor area, number of rooms etc.
C. Predict whether there will be abnormally heavy rainfall next year
D. Detect Pneumonia from Chest X-ray images
Correct Answer: B. Predict the price of a house based on floor area, number of rooms etc.

Detailed Solution : House Price is a continuous real valued variable, so we have to use
regression methods for this task.

______________________________________________________________________________
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses Indian
Institute of Technology Kharagpur

QUESTION 5:
Occam’s razor is an example of:
A. Inductive bias
B. Preference bias

Correct Answer: B. Preference bias

Detailed Solution : Prefer simplest hypothesis over complex one

______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 6:
A feature F1 can take certain value: A, B, C, D, E, F and represents grade of students from a
college. Which of the following statements is true in the following case?
A. Feature F1 is an example of a nominal variable.
B. Feature F1 is an example of ordinal variables.
C. It doesn’t belong to any of the above categories.
D. Both of these

Correct Answer: B. Feature F1 is an example of ordinal variables.

Detailed Solution : Ordinal variables are the variables which have some order in their
categories. For example, grade A should be considered as higher grade than grade B.

______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 7:

Which of the following is a categorical feature?

A. Height of a person
B. Price of petroleum
C. Mother tongue of a person
D. Amount of rainfall in a day

Correct Answer: C. Mother tongue of a person

Detailed Solution : Categorical variables represent types of data which may be divided into
groups. All other features are continuous)
______________________________________________________________________________
 QUESTION 8:

Which of the following tasks is NOT a suitable machine learning task?

A. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph

B. Predicting if a stock price will rise or fall
C. Predicting the price of petroleum
D. Grouping mails as spams or non-spams

Correct Answer : A. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph

Detailed Solution : Finding the shortest path is a graph theory based task, whereas other
options are completely suitable for machine learning.
______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 9:
Which of the following is correct for reinforcement learning?

A. The algorithm plans a sequence of actions from the current state.

B. The algorithm plans one action at each time step.
C. The training instances contain examples of states and best actions of the states.
D. The algorithm groups unseen data based on similarity.

Correct Answer : B. The algorithm plans one action at each time step.

Detailed Solution : In reinforcement learning, the agent tries to learn the policy function i.e. the
best action to take at a given state.
______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 10:

What is the use of Validation dataset in Machine Learning?

A. To train the machine learning model.

B. To evaluate the performance of the machine learning model
C. To tune the hyperparameters of the machine learning model
D. None of the above.
Correct Answer : C. To tune the hyperparameters of the machine learning model

Detailed Solution : The validation dataset provides an unbiased evaluation of a model fit on the
training dataset while tuning the model's hyperparameters.
______________________________________________________________________________

*******END*******
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses Indian
Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Introduction to
Machine Learning
Assignment- Week 1
TYPE OF QUESTION: MCQ
Number of questions: 10 Total mark: 10 X 2 = 20

MCQ Question
QUESTION 1:

Which of the following are classification tasks?

A. Find the gender of a person by analyzing his writing style

B. Predict the price of a house based on floor area, number of rooms etc.
C. Predict the temperature for the next day
D. Predict the number of copies of a book that will be sold this month

Correct Answer: A

Detailed Solution : The number of classes in gender identification (A) is discrete. So, it’s
a classification task. In other options, the output variable is a continuous class, so these
are regression tasks.
______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 2:
Which of the following is a not categorical feature?

A. Gender of a person
B. Height of a person
C. Types of Mountains
D. Nationality of a person

Correct Answer : B

Detailed Solution : Categorical variables represent types of data which may be divided
into groups. All other features are continuous.
______________________________________________________________________________
QUESTION 3:

Which of the following tasks is NOT a suitable machine learning task?

A. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph

B. Predicting if a stock price will rise or fall
C. Predicting the price of petroleum
D. Grouping mails as spams or non-spams

Correct Answer : A. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph

Detailed Solution : Finding the shortest path is a graph theory based task, whereas other
options are completely suitable for machine learning.
______________________________________________________________________________
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses Indian
Institute of Technology Kharagpur

QUESTION 4:

Suppose I have 10,000 emails in my mailbox out of which 200 are spams. The spam detection
system detects 150 mails as spams, out of which 50 are actually spams. What is the precision and
recall of my spam detection system?

A. Precision = 33.333%, Recall = 25%

B. Precision = 25%, Recall = 33.33%
C. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 75%
D. Precision = 75%, Recall = 33.33%

Correct Answer: A

Detailed Solution :
𝑇𝑝
Precision = 𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝
50
= 150
= 33. 333%
𝑇𝑝
Recall = 𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑛
50
= 200
= 25%

______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 5 :
A feature F1 can take certain values: A, B, C, D, E, F and represents the grade of
students from a college. Which of the following statements is true in the following case?

A. Feature F1 is an example of a nominal variable.

B. Feature F1 is an example of ordinal variables.
C. It doesn’t belong to any of the above categories.
D. Both of these

Correct Answer: B. Feature F1 is an example of ordinal variables.

Detailed Solution : Ordinal variables are the variables which have some order in their
categories. For example, grade A should be considered as higher grade than grade B.

______________________________________________________________________________
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

QUESTION 6:
One of the most common uses of Machine Learning today is in the domain of Robotics.
Robotic tasks include a multitude of ML methods tailored towards navigation, robotic
control and a number of other tasks. Robotic control includes controlling the actuators
available to the robotic system. An example of this is control of a painting arm in
automotive industries.
The robotic arm must be able to paint every corner in the automotive parts while
minimizing the quantity of paint wasted in the process. Which of the following learning
paradigms would you select for training such a robotic arm?

A. Supervised learning
B. Unsupervised learning
C. Combination of supervised and unsupervised learning
D. Reinforcement learning

Correct Answer : D. Reinforcement learning

Detailed Solution : This kind of a learning problem warrants the use of Reinforcement
Learning. We see that the robotic arm has to cover every corner, i.e. maximize the area
covered and all the while minimizing the quantity of paint wasted in the process. One can
design a primitive reward signal that takes into account the area covered and paint wasted
(normalized to some extent) and use it to train a reinforcement learning agent.

______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 7:
1. How many Boolean functions are possible with 𝑛 features?
𝑁

A. 2 ( )
2

( 𝑁)
B. 2
2
C. (𝑁 )
𝑁
D. (4 )
𝑁

Correct Answer: A. 2 ( )
2

Detailed Solution : There are 2N possible combinations of n input boolean features. Each of
𝑁
2
these input feature vectors can be either True (1) or False (0), so there can be 2 possible truth
tables for the boolean function.
______________________________________________________________________________
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

QUESTION 8:

What is the use of Validation dataset in Machine Learning?

A. To train the machine learning model.

B. To evaluate the performance of the machine learning model
C. To tune the hyperparameters of the machine learning model
D. None of the above.
Correct Answer : C. To tune the hyperparameters of the machine learning model

Detailed Solution : The validation dataset provides an unbiased evaluation of a model fit on the
training dataset while tuning the model's hyperparameters.
______________________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 9:

Regarding bias and variance, which of the following statements are true? (Here ‘high’ and ‘low’ are
relative to the ideal model.)
A. Models which overfit have a high bias.
B. Models which overfit have a low bias.
C. Models which underfit have a high variance.
D. Models which underfit have a low variance.

Correct Answer : B, D

Detailed Solution : In supervised learning, underfitting happens when a model is unable to capture
the underlying pattern of the data. These models usually have high bias and low variance.
Overfitting happens when our model captures the noise along with the underlying pattern in data.
These models have low bias and high variance.
_____________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 10:
Identify whether the following statement is true or false?
“Occam’s Razor is an example of Inductive Bias”

A. True
B. False

Correct Answer : A. True

Detailed Solution : Occam’s razor is a classic example of Inductive Bias.

__________________________________________________________________________

*******END*******
 Introduction to Machine Learning -IITKGP
Assignment - 1
TYPE OF QUESTION: MCQ/MSQ
Number of questions: 15 Total mark: 2 * 15 = 30

1. Which of the following is/are classification tasks?

a. Find the gender of a person by analyzing his writing style

b. Predict the price of a house based on floor area, number of rooms, etc.
c. Predict whether there will be abnormally heavy rainfall next year
d. Predict the number of copies of a book that will be sold this month

Correct Answers: a, c

Explanation: In (c), the amount of rainfall is a continuous variable. But, we are predicting
whether there will be abnormally heavy rainfall next year or not. So it is a Classification
task. Similarly, the number of classes in gender identification (a) is discrete. So, it’s a
classification task. The output variable is a continuous class in other options, so these are
regression tasks.

2. A feature F1 can take certain values: A, B, C, D, E, F, and represents the grade of students
from a college. Which of the following statement is true in the following case?
a. Feature F1 is an example of a nominal variable.
b. Feature F1 is an example of an ordinal variable.
c. It doesn’t belong to any of the above categories.
d. Both of these

Correct Answer: b

Explanation: Ordinal variables are the variables that have some order in their categories.
For example, grade A should be considered a high grade than grade B.

_______________________________________________________________________
3. Suppose I have 10,000 emails in my mailbox out of which 200 are spams. The spam
detection system detects 150 emails as spams, out of which 50 are actually spam. What is
the precision and recall of my spam detection system?

a. Precision = 33.333%, Recall = 25%

b. Precision = 25%, Recall = 33.33%
c. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 75%
d. Precision = 75%, Recall = 33.33%

Correct Answer: a

Explanation:

We know that,
𝑇𝑝
Precision =
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝

50
=
150

= 33.333%
𝑇𝑝
Recall =
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑛

50
=
200

= 25%
___________________________________________________________________________

4. Which of the following statements describes what is most likely TRUE when the amount
of training data increases?

a. Training error usually decreases and generalization error usually increases.

b. Training error usually decreases and generalization error usually decreases.
c. Training error usually increases and generalization error usually decreases.
d. Training error usually increases and generalization error usually increases.

Correct Answer: a

Explanation: When the training data increases, the decision boundary becomes very complex
to fit the data. So, the generalization capability usually reduces with the increase in training
data.

___________________________________________________________________________
5. You trained a learning algorithm, and plot the learning curve. The following figure is
obtained.

The algorithm is suffering from

a. High bias
b. High variance
c. Neither

Correct Answer: a

Explanation: In the plot, the training error is increased with the training set size. The true error
is around 0.4 which is quite high. Thus, we can say that the bias is high.
___________________________________________________________________________
6. I am the marketing consultant of a leading e-commerce website. I have been given a task
of making a system that recommends products to users based on their activity on Facebook.
I realize that user interests could be highly variable. Hence, I decide to

T1) Cluster the users into communities of like-minded people and

T2) Train separate models for each community to predict which product category (e.g.,
electronic gadgets, cosmetics, etc.) would be the most relevant to that community.

The task T1 is a/an ______________ learning problem and T2 is a/an

________________ problem.
Choose from the options:
a. Supervised and unsupervised
b. Unsupervised and supervised
c. Supervised and supervised
d. Unsupervised and unsupervised

Correct Answer: b

Explanation: From the definition of supervised and unsupervised learning

___________________________________________________________________________

7. Select the correct equations.

TP - True Positive, TN - True Negative, FP - False Positive, FN - False Negative
𝑇𝑝
i. Precision =
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝
𝐹𝑝
ii. Recall =
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝
𝑇𝑝
iii. Recall =
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑛
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑛
iv. Accuracy=
𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝+𝑇𝑛+𝐹𝑛
a. i, iii, iv
b. i and iii
c. ii and iv
d. i, ii, iii, iv
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: From the definition of Precision, Recall, and Accuracy
_________________________________________________________________________

8. Which of the following tasks is NOT a suitable machine learning task(s)?

a. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph
b. Predicting if a stock price will rise or fall
c. Predicting the price of petroleum
d. Grouping mails as spams or non-spams
Correct Answer: a
Explanation: Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph is not a suitable
machine-learning task because it falls under the category of graph algorithms and can be
efficiently solved using algorithms like Dijkstra's algorithm. Machine learning is typically used
for tasks that involve pattern recognition, prediction, or classification based on data. In this
case, the task of finding the shortest path in a graph is better suited for algorithmic or graph
theory-based approaches rather than machine learning.
__________________________________________________________________________

9. Which of the following is/are associated with overfitting in machine learning?

a. High bias
b. Low bias
c. Low variance
d. High variance
e. Good performance on training data
f. Poor performance on test data

Correct Answers: b, d, e, f
 Explanation: Overfitting is characterized by good performance on the training data, as the
model has essentially memorized the data. However, it leads to poor performance on the
test data because the model fails to generalize well. Overfitting is associated with low bias
and high variance, meaning the model is sensitive to noise or fluctuations in the training
data.
________________________________________________________________________

10. Which of the following statements about cross-validation in machine learning is/are true?
a. Cross-validation is used to evaluate a model's performance on the training data.
b. Cross-validation guarantees that a model will generalize well to unseen data.
c. Cross-validation is only applicable to classification problems and not regression
problems.
d. Cross-validation helps in estimating the model's performance on unseen data by
simulating the test phase.
Correct Answer: d
Explanation: Cross-validation is a technique used in machine learning to assess the
performance and generalization ability of a model. It involves dividing the available labeled
data into multiple subsets or folds. The model is trained on a portion of the data (training set)
and evaluated on the remaining portion (validation or test set). By repeating this process with
different partitions of the data, cross-validation provides an estimate of the model's
performance on unseen data.
___________________________________________________________________________
11. What does k-fold cross-validation involve in machine learning?
a. Splitting the dataset into k equal-sized training and test sets.
b. Splitting the dataset into k unequal-sized training and test sets.
c. Partitioning the dataset into k subsets, and iteratively using each subset as a
validation set while the remaining k-1 subsets are used for training.
d. Dividing the dataset into k subsets, where each subset represents a unique class label
for classification tasks.
Correct Answer: c
Explanation: K-fold cross-validation involves dividing the dataset into k subsets or folds. The
process then iterates k times, where each time, one of the k subsets is used as the validation set,
while the remaining k-1 subsets are used for training the model. This ensures that each subset
is used as the validation set exactly once, and the model is trained and evaluated k times, with
each fold serving as the validation set once.
___________________________________________________________________________
12. What does the term "feature space" refer to in machine learning?
a. The space where the machine learning model is trained.
b. The space where the machine learning model is deployed.
c. The space which is formed by the input variables used in a machine learning model.
d. The space where the output predictions are made by a machine learning model.
Correct Answer: c
Explanation: The feature space in machine learning refers to the space formed by the input
variables or features used in a model. It represents the space where the data points reside.
___________________________________________________________________________

13. Which of the following statements is/are true regarding supervised and unsupervised
learning?
a. Supervised learning can handle both labeled and unlabeled data.
b. Unsupervised learning requires human experts to label the data.
c. Supervised learning can be used for regression and classification tasks.
d. Unsupervised learning aims to find hidden patterns in the data.
Correct Answers: c, d
Explanation:
Option “a” is incorrect. Supervised learning specifically requires labeled data, while
unsupervised learning deals with unlabeled data.
Option “b” is incorrect. Unsupervised learning does not require human experts to label the data;
it learns from the raw, unlabeled data.
Option “c” is correct. Supervised learning encompasses both regression, where the output
variable is continuous, and classification, where the output variable is categorical.
Option “d” is correct. Unsupervised learning aims to find hidden patterns, structures, or
relationships within the data without any prior knowledge of the output labels.
___________________________________________________________________________
14. One of the ways to mitigate overfitting is
a. By increasing the model complexity
b. By reducing the amount of training data
c. By adding more features to the model
d. By decreasing the model complexity

Correct Answer: d
Explanation: Overfitting occurs when a machine learning model performs well on the training
data but fails to generalize to new, unseen data. It usually happens when the model becomes
too complex and starts to memorize the training examples instead of learning the underlying
patterns. To mitigate overfitting, one of the effective approaches is to decrease the model
complexity.
__________________________________________________________________________

15. How many Boolean functions are possible with 𝑁 features?

𝑁
a. (22 )
b. (2𝑁 )
c. (𝑁 2 )
d. (4𝑁 )

Correct Answer: a
Explanation: Any variable ‘A’ can have 2 values (i.e., 0 or 1)
For ‘N’ variables there are 2N entries in the truth table.
And each output of any particular row in the truth table can be 0 or 1.
𝑁
Hence, we have (22 ) different Boolean functions with N variables.
___________________________________________________________________________
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses Indian
Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Introduction to
Machine Learning
Assignment- Week 1
TYPE OF QUESTION: MCQ
Number of questions: 10 Total mark: 10 X 2 = 20

MCQ Question
_______________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 1:

Which of the following are classification tasks?

A. Detect pneumonia from chest X-ray image

B. Predict the price of a house based on floor area, number of rooms etc.
C. Predict the temperature for the next day
D. Predict the amount of rainfall

Correct Answer: A

Detailed Solution : The number of classes in pneumonia detection is discrete. So, it’s a
classification task. In other options, the output variable is a continuous class, so these are
regression tasks.
_______________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 2:
Which of the following is not a type of supervised learning?
A. Classification
B. Regression
C. Clustering
D. None of the above
Correct Answer: C. Clustering
Detailed Solution : Classification and Regression are both supervised learning methods
as they need class labels or target values for training, but Clustering doesn't need target
values.
_______________________________________________________________________
QUESTION 3:

Which of the following tasks is NOT a suitable machine learning task?

A. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a graph

B. Predicting if a stock price will rise or fall
C. Predicting the price of petroleum
D. Grouping mails as spams or non-spams

Correct Answer : A. Finding the shortest path between a pair of nodes in a

graph

Detailed Solution : Finding the shortest path is a graph theory based task, whereas
other options are completely suitable for machine learning.
_____________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 4:

Suppose I have 10,000 emails in my mailbox out of which 300 are spams. The spam detection
system detects 150 mails as spams, out of which 50 are actually spams. What is the precision
and recall of my spam detection system?

A. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 25%

B. Precision = 25%, Recall = 33.33%
C. Precision = 33.33%, Recall = 16.66%
D. Precision = 75%, Recall = 33.33%

Correct Answer: C

Detailed Solution :
𝑇𝑝
Precision = 𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑝
50
= 50 + 100
= 33. 33%
𝑇𝑝
Recall = 𝑇𝑝+𝐹𝑛
50
= 50+250
= 16. 66%
_______________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 5 :

Which of the following is/are supervised learning problems?

A. Predicting disease from blood samples.

B. Grouping students in the same class based on similar features.

C. Face recognition to unlock your phone.

Correct Answer: A, C
Detailed Solution: Option B is an unsupervised learning problem.

_______________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 6:

Aliens challenge you to a complex game that no human has seen before. They give you
time to learn the game and develop strategies before the final showdown. You choose to
use machine learning because an intelligent machine is your only hope. Which machine
learning paradigm should you choose for this?
A. Supervised learning
B. Unsupervised learning
C. Reinforcement learning
D. Use a random number generator and hope for the best

Correct Answer: C. Reinforcement learning

Detailed Solution: Reinforcement learning is the optimal method for building agents for
complex games where no expert trajectories exist. It is possible to design a reward
function/signal that depends on the outcome of the game. The objective of the player
agent is to maximize the total reward collected from the game.

_______________________________________________________________________
 NPTEL Online Certification Courses
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

QUESTION 7:
How many Boolean functions are possible with 𝑁 features?
𝑁

( )
A. 2
2

( 𝑁)
B. 2
2
C. (𝑁 )
𝑁
D. (4 )
𝑁

Correct Answer: A. 2 ( )
2

Detailed Solution : There are 2N possible combinations of N input boolean features.

Each of these input feature vectors can be either True (1) or False (0), so there can be
𝑁
2
2 possible truth tables for the boolean function.
_______________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 8:

What is the use of Validation dataset in Machine Learning?

A. To train the machine learning model.

B. To evaluate the performance of the machine learning model
C. To tune the hyperparameters of the machine learning model
D. None of the above.

Correct Answer : C. To tune the hyperparameters of the machine learning model

Detailed Solution : The validation dataset is used to tune the model's hyperparameters during
training

_______________________________________________________________________
.

_______________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 9:

Regarding bias and variance, which of the following statements are true? (Here ‘high’ and
‘low’ are relative to the ideal model.)
A. Models which overfit have a high bias.
B. Models which overfit have a low bias.
C. Models which underfit have a high variance.
D. Models which underfit have a low variance.

Correct Answer : B, D

Detailed Solution : In supervised learning, underfitting happens when a model is unable

to capture the underlying pattern of the data. These models usually have high bias and
low variance. Overfitting happens when our model captures the noise along with the
underlying pattern in data. These models have low bias and high variance.
_____________________________________________________________________

QUESTION 10:
Which of the following is a categorical feature?

A. Height of a person
B. Price of petroleum
C. Mother tongue of a person
D. Amount of rainfall in a day

Correct Answer: C
Detailed Solution: Categorical variables represent types of data which may be divided
into groups. Mother tongue is a categorical feature. All other options are continuous.
______________________________________________________________________

*******END*******