Ain Shams University

Faculty of Engineering
Dept. Computer & Systems Engineering
4th Year, Computer and Systems Engineering

2nd Semester 2016-2017 Course Code: CSE–465 Time Allowed: 1.5hrs

Selected Topics in Systems Engineering

The exam consists of 3 questions in 1 page Total Marks: 30

1. General Questions [10 Marks] – Give a one sentence answer to the questions be-
low:

(a) Which classifier should you use for minimum error rate classification?
MAP Classifier
(b) What does it mean to say that 2 features are negatively correlated?
When one increases, the other tends to decrease, and when one decreases, the
other tends to increase
(c) Suppose we have an estimator θ̂ for a parameter θ. State two conditions for θ̂
to be a good estimator of θ.
Estimator θ̂ should be unbiased and have low variance
(d) What is an optimal data distribution for a linear discriminant function?
Gaussian distribution with equal covariances
(e) What is the difference between overfitting and underfitting?
Overfitting occurs when the model or the algorithm fits the data too well
(low bias but high variance) while underfitting occurs when the model or the
algorithm does not fit the data well enough (low variance but high bias)

2. Bayesian Classifiers [10 Marks] – Consider a one dimensional two–category clas-

sification problem. Suppose the class conditional densities are given by
(
1
if 0≤x≤3
p(x|C1 ) = N (2, 1) and p(x|C2 ) = 3
0 if otherwise

(a) Design the ML classifier

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(b) Suppose priors are P (C1 ) = 2/3 and P (C2 ) = 1/3. Design the MAP classifier

(c) Suppose priors are equal and the loss functions are as follows: loss for decid-
ing C1 when the true class is C2 is 30, loss for deciding C2 when the true class
C1 is 20. Loss for deciding the true class is 0. Design the Minimum Bayes risk
classifier.

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 In each case above, give the decision boundaries and decision regions.

3. Maximum Likelihood Estimation [10 Marks] – Consider a one dimensional two

category classification problem. Suppose the class conditional densities are given
by
( (
0 if x<0 0 if x<0
p(x|C1 ) = −θ1 x and p(x|C2 ) = −θ2 x
θ1 e if x≥0 θ2 e if x≥0

Suppose you have collected data for class 1 and stored it in array D1 = {1, 5} and
data for class 2 and stored it in array D2 = {3, 6, 9}.

(a) Find the maximum likelihood estimates for parameters θ1 and θ2 .

(b) Using ML classifier, find decision regions and decision boundaries using the
parameters estimated in (a)

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