Free Practice Questions for CompTIA DY0-001 Exam

→ Binning (also known as discretization) involves grouping continuous variables into categories or bins. This technique is useful for aggregation, especially when analyzing trends across ranges (e.g., age groups: 0–18, 19–35, etc.).

In this case, aggregating observations by age ranges would help analyze age-related illnesses more clearly.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A: Label encoding is used to convert categorical values into numeric codes.

B: Linearization generally refers to transforming non-linear relationships into linear ones — not relevant here.

D: Imputing fills missing values, not aggregates or groups them.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 3.3:“Binning is used to group continuous data for summarization or pattern discovery. Often used in demographic analysis such as age ranges.”

Data Science for Business – Chapter 5:“Discretization simplifies complex continuous variables into interpretable categories, enhancing visualization and trend detection.”

→ For small sample sizes (typically n < 30), the Student's t-distribution is preferred over the normal distribution for hypothesis testing because it accounts for the added uncertainty in the estimate of the standard deviation. With 20 observations, the t-distribution is more appropriate and reliable.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A: Power law is used in modeling rare events or heavy-tailed distributions, not hypothesis testing.

B: The normal distribution is more appropriate when the sample size is large.

C: Uniform distribution assumes equal probability — not used in inferential statistics.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 1.3:“The t-distribution is used for small sample hypothesis testing where the population standard deviation is unknown.”

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→ Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is a supervised classification method used to predict a categorical target (such as travel destination) based on multiple input features. It models decision boundaries between classes — which is appropriate when predicting a fixed set of destinations.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B: k-means is unsupervised and doesn't use labeled output like travel destination.

C: Latent Semantic Analysis is used for extracting relationships from textual data — not categorical prediction.

D: PCA reduces dimensionality but doesn’t classify.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Official Study Guide – Section 4.1:“Linear Discriminant Analysis is used when the response variable is categorical and the objective is classification.”

Classification Techniques Guide, Chapter 7:“LDA excels in multi-class prediction when the input data is continuous and the output is a known category.”

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→ A/B testing allows a controlled experiment comparing the performance of two models — the current (A) vs. the candidate (B) — on live data. It’s an industry best practice to validate real-world behavior before full replacement.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B: Performance monitoring helps detect drift but doesn’t directly compare models.

C: CI/CD automates deployment but doesn’t evaluate performance differences.

D: Containerization packages the model but doesn't test it comparatively.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 5.5:“A/B testing is a recommended approach to validate model performance before switching versions in production.”

ML System Operations Guide, Chapter 6:“Use A/B testing to ensure new models outperform baselines before full rollout.”

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→ The graph represents a classic “elbow curve,” which is often used in clustering (e.g., k-means) to help determine the optimal number of clusters. The point where the curve starts to level off (the “elbow”) reflects the best trade-off between model accuracy and processing efficiency.

In this graph, the elbow visually occurs around k = 10. Beyond that, the processing time continues to decrease, but the marginal gain in clustering quality (or drop in processing time) diminishes.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A: k = 2 underfits the data — too few clusters.

C & D: k = 15 or 20 provides minimal additional benefit in processing but may overcomplicate the model.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 4.2:“The elbow method identifies the optimal number of clusters where the rate of improvement drops significantly.”

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→ LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator) regression minimizes the squared residuals (e²), just like OLS, but adds an L1 penalty to encourage sparsity in the coefficients. Thus, the residual component minimized is still the sum of squared errors.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A: |e| is absolute error, not used in standard LASSO objective.

B: e is the error term, but minimization applies to its squared version.

C: Minimizing to exactly 0 is idealistic but not realistic.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 3.3:“LASSO minimizes squared errors with an additional L1 regularization term.”

Elements of Statistical Learning, Chapter 6:“LASSO regression uses the same residual sum of squares (e²) as OLS for error measurement, with an added constraint.”

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→ A systematic error is a consistent, repeatable error caused by faulty equipment or flawed measurement techniques. Since one sensor consistently over-reports values, this is a classic case of systematic error.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A: Synthetic data is artificially generated — unrelated to sensor malfunction.

C: Heteroskedasticity refers to non-constant variance — not consistent bias.

D: Idiosyncratic errors are random and unpredictable — not consistent.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 1.4:“Systematic errors arise from consistent biases in measurement devices or methods, requiring calibration or correction.”

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Scheduling problems typically involve the assignment of limited resources (e.g., time, personnel, machines) over time to tasks, often under constraints. These problems are inherently mathematical and are typically solved using:

→ Constrained Optimization – which is a mathematical technique for optimizing an objective function subject to one or more constraints. This tool is widely used for operations research problems such as scheduling, resource allocation, logistics, and supply chain optimization.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. One-armed bandit: Refers to a class of algorithms used for balancing exploration and exploitation, not scheduling.

C. Decision tree: Used for classification and regression, not for constraint-based scheduling.

D. Gradient descent: An optimization method for training models (typically ML), but not specifically suitable for complex constraint-based scheduling.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Official Study Guide – Section 3.4 (Modeling Tools):“Scheduling and allocation problems are best addressed using constrained optimization techniques which allow incorporation of resource limits and goal functions.”

Data Science and Operations Research Foundations, Chapter 7:“Constraint-based optimization is the primary mathematical strategy used in scheduling problems to meet deadlines, minimize cost, or maximize throughput.”

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→ Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised technique used to reduce the dimensionality of large datasets by transforming correlated features into a smaller set of uncorrelated components (principal components) while retaining the most variance.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B: Classification is a predictive modeling task; PCA is not inherently predictive.

C: Regression models numerical relationships; PCA does not predict outcomes.

D: Recommendation systems use collaborative or content filtering, not PCA directly.

Official References:

CompTIA DataX (DY0-001) Study Guide – Section 3.3:“PCA is primarily used for reducing the number of variables while preserving data structure and minimizing information loss.”

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Chapter 12:“PCA identifies principal axes of variation and is widely used in preprocessing for dimensionality reduction.”

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