Quiz 2 Practice Solutions

[chendaniely]

Describe a real-life application in which classification might be useful. Describe what you are trying to predict as well as the predictors/explanatory variables used in the prediction.

Classifying whether or not a tumor is malignant or benign given it's size (in mm) and shape (e.g., round, abnormally shaped, etc).

In your own words, explain the k-nearest neighbours classification algorithm.

See book chapter: https://datasciencebook.ca/classification1.html#classification-with-k-nearest-neighbors

In your own words, describe one advantage and one disadvantage of k-nn classification.

• advantage: can work with non linear data, easy to implmenet
• disadvantage: does not work well with large data; does not work will with many features (need to calculate a lot of distances); need to make sure data in all dimentions is standarized (center + scaled)

List 2 advantages of using GitHub for version control. Write your answer in your own words

see book chapter: https://datasciencebook.ca/Getting-started-with-version-control.html#what-is-version-control-and-why-should-i-use-it