Machine Learning

Question bank

1. Define machine learning. Which are different applications of ML? what is difference between
traditional programming and ML?
2. Which are different methods of learning? Give one example of each method.
3. Compare classification and regression.
4. Define the terms variance and bias. Explain trade-off between variance and bias?
5. Describe linear regression and non-linear regression.
6. Explain multivariate regression.Write down steps of multivariate regression. What are
advantages and disadvantages of multivariate regression?
7. What are MSE and RMSE?
8. Compare linear regression and logistic regression.
9. What is VIF? How do you calculate it?
10. What is Gradient descent?
11. What are the disadvantages of linear regression?
12. What is overfitting? What is the use of regularization?
13. Explain SVM algorithm for classification.
14. What is Linear discriminant analysis and PCA?
15. Why is LDA important?
16. Write names of different dimensionality reduction methods? Explain any one method.
17. Compare between single layer perceptron and multi layer perceptron.
18. How does Gradient descent help in minimizing the cost function?
19. Write Back propagation algorithm.
20. Describe MLE and MAP.
21. Write down the applications of ANN.
22. Define learning rate in neural network. How to choose learning rate for optimization
problem?
23. Define the terms Training, Activation function, Weights and loss function in ANN.
24. Explain feed forward neural network.
25. What is activation function in ANN? Describe the sigmoid activation function and
Tanh activation function used in ANN.
26. How does gradient descent help in minimizing the cost function?
27. How does the decision tree algorithm works? Give one example.
28. Which are the attribute selection measures in decision tree? Explain.
29. What is mean by pruning? Which are different techniques used for pruning?
30. Which are the advantages and disadvantages of decision tree?
31. Define the terms overfitting, underfitting, regularization.
32. Which are different cross validation methods? Explain two cross validation methods.
33. What is BootstrapPing? Which steps are used in bootstrapping? Explain parametric and non
parametric bootstrapping with example.
34. Explain different ensemble learning techniques.
35. What are the advantages and disadvantages of random forest learning algorithm?
36. Write an algorithm for partition clustering and hierarchical clustering. Mention
example of each method.
37. Write following algorithms
Birch algorithm
 HMM algorithm
CURE algorithm
38. Let’s say you are building a model that detects whether a person has diabetes or not.
After the train-test split, you got a test set of length 100, out of which 70 data points
are labelled positive (1), and 30 data points are labelled negative (0). Draw confusion
matrix based on the given data. Calculate True positive rate, True negative rate, False
positive rate and False negative rate.
39. Design a system for human activity recognition.
40. What is reinforcement learning? Explain working of reinforcement learning. Write an
algorithm for reinforcement learning.
41. Write working of expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. What is convergance in
the EM algorithm? What are advantages and disadvantages of EM?
42. Write an algorithm for GMM.
43. What are ensemble methods? Which are different types of ensemble methods?
44. Design a neural network to solve XOR problem.
What is VIF? How do you calculate it?

Variance inflation factors (VIF) measure how much the variance of

an estimated regression coefficient is increased because of
collinearity. It computes how much multicollinearity exists in a
regression analysis.

It performs ordinary least square regression that has Xi as a function

of all the other explanatory or independent variables and then
calculates VIF using the formula:

What is Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)?

LDA is an analytical method that finds the linear combination of features that best
separates the data into various classes. In other words, it finds the best linear
equation that clearly separates the data into classes. It’s one of the numerous
discriminant analysis methods. LDA is also a dimensionality reduction method but its
simplicity and robustness make it suitable for classification problems.

Why is Linear Discriminant Analysis important?

Some of the reasons LDA is important include:

 It is multifaceted and can handle multiple and different scenarios

 It can be used as a multi-class linear classifier unlike Logistic regression
 It can be used for dimensionality reduction of features
 It can be used for extracting features in face detection models.