Assignment 1

Introduction to Machine Learning

Prof. B. Ravindran
1. Which of the following is a supervised learning problem? (multiple options may be correct)
(a) Predicting the outcome of a cricket match as win or loss based on historical data.
(b) Recommending a movie to an exisiting user on a website like IMdB based on the search
history (including other users).
(c) Predicting the gender of a person from his/her image. You are given the data of 1 Million
images along the gender.
(d) Given the class labels of old news articles, predicting the class of a new news article from
its content. Class of a news article can be such as sports, politics, technology, etc.
Sol. (a), (b), (c), (d)

2. Which of the following are classification problems? (multiple options may be correct)
(a) Predicting the temperature (in Celsius) of a room from other environmental features (such
as atmospheric pressure, humidity etc).
(b) Predicting if a cricket player is a batsman or bowler given his playing records.
(c) Finding the shorter route between two existing routes between two points.
(d) Predicting if a particular route between two points has traffic jam or not based on the
travel time of vehicles.
Sol. (b),(d)

3. Which of the following is a regression task? (multiple options may be correct)

(a) Predicting the monthly sales of a cloth store in rupees.
(b) Predicting if a user would like to listen to a newly released song or not based on historical
data.
(c) Predicting the confirmation probability (in fraction) of your train ticket whose current
status is waiting list based on historical data.
(d) Predicting if a patient has diabetes or not based on historical medical records.
Sol. (a) and (c)
4. Which of the following is an unsupervised task? (multiple options may be correct)
(a) Grouping images of footwear and caps separately for a given set of images.
(b) Learning to play chess.
(c) Predicting if an edible item is sweet or spicy based on the information of the ingredients
and their quantities.
(d) all of the above

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 Sol. (a)
option (c) has the labels, so it is supervised task
5. Which of the following is a categorical feature?
(a) Number of legs of an animal
(b) Number of hours you study in a day
(c) Branch of an engineering student
(d) Your weekly expenditure in rupees.
Sol. (c)
6. Let X and Y be a uniformly distributed random variable over the interval [0, 4] and [0, 3]
respectively. If X and Y are independent events, then compute the probability,
P(max(X, Y ) > 2)
1
(a) 6
5
(b) 6
2
(c) 3
(d) None of the above
Sol. (c)

P(max(X, Y ) > 2) = P(X > 2) + P(Y > 2) − P(X > 2 & Y > 2)
1 1 1 1
= + − ×
2 3 2 3
2
=
3
 
a b
7. Let the trace and determinant of a matrix A = be 4 and 3 respectively. The eigenvalues
b c
of A are
√ √ √
(a) 3+2 7ι , 3−2 7ι , where ι = −1
(b) 1, 3
(c) None of the above
(d) Can not be computed as the entries of the matrix A are not given.
Sol. (b)
Use of the facts that the trace and determinant of a matrix is equal to the sum and product
of its eigenvalues respectively. Using this

λ1 + λ2 = 4, λ1 λ2 = 3

where λ1 and λ2 denotes the eigenvalues. Solve the above two equations in two variables or
check if option (b) satisfies them.

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 8. What would be the ideal complexity of the curve which can be used for polynomial curve
fitting for the data shown below. (y-axis denotes the dependent variable)

(a) Linear
(b) Quadratic
(c) Cubic
(d) If there are N training samples, fit a (N − 1)th order polynomial for achieving minimum
training error.

Sol. (c)

9. Which of the following are true about bias and variance of overfitted and underfitted models?
(multiple options may be correct)

(a) Underfitted models have low bias.

(b) Underfitted models have high bias.
(c) Overfitted models have low variance.
(d) Overfitted models have high variance.

Sol. (b), (d)

10. What happens when your model complexity increases? (multiple options may be correct)
(a) Model Bias increases
(b) Model Bias decreases
(c) Variance of the model increases
(d) Variance of the model decreases
Sol. (b) and (c)