DATA SCIENCE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Random sampling. In this technique, each member of the population has an equal chance of being selected as the subject. The entire process of sampling is done in a single step with each subject selected independently of the other members of the population. There are many methods to proceed with simple random sampling. A sample chosen randomly is meant to … Read more
Random Forest or Random Decision Forest are an ensemble learning method for classification, regression, and other tasks, that operate by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time and outputting the class that is the mode of the classes (classification) or mean prediction (regression) of the individual trees. Random decision forests correct for decision trees habit of overfitting to … Read more
Radial Basis Function(RBF) network is an artificial neural network that uses radial basis functions as activation functions. The output of the network is a linear combination of radial basis functions of the inputs and neuron parameters. Radial basis function networks have many uses, including function approximation, time series prediction, classification, and system control. They were first formulated in a 1988 … Read more
QQ plots – Quantile-Quantile plots are a graphical technique for determining if two data sets come from populations with a common distribution. A q-q plot is a plot of the quantiles of the first data set against the quantiles of the second data set. By a quantile, we mean the fraction (or percent) of points below the given value. The … Read more
Q-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, Q-learning can be used to find an optimal action selection policy for any given (finite) Markov decision process (MDP). It works by learning an action-value function that ultimately gives the expected utility of taking a given action in a given state and following the optimal policy thereafter. A policy is a rule … Read more
Pruning is a technique in machine learning that reduces the size of decision trees by removing sections of the tree that provide a little power to classify instances. Pruning reduces the complexity of the final classifier, and hence improves predictive accuracy by the reduction of overfitting. One of the questions that arise in a decision tree algorithm is the optimal … Read more
Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) is kind of feedforward neural network. In the PNN algorithm, the parent probability distribution function (PDF) of each class is approximated by a Parzen window and a non-parametric function. Then, using PDF of each class, the class probability of a new input data is estimated and Bayes’ rule is then employed to allocate the class with … Read more
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a statistical procedure that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components (or sometimes, principal modes of variation). The number of principal components is less than or equal to the smaller of (number of original variables or … Read more
Predictive Modeling is a process through which a future outcome or behavior is predicted based on the past and current data at hand. It is a statistical analysis technique that enables the evaluation and calculation of the probability of certain results. Predictive modeling works by collecting data, creating a statistical model and applying probabilistic techniques to predict the likely outcome. … Read more
Power Analysis is an important aspect of experimental design. It allows us to determine the sample size required to detect an effect of a given size with a given degree of confidence. There are four parameters involved in a power analysis. The research must ‘know’ 3 and solve for the 4th. 1. Alpha: Probability of finding significance where there is … Read more