ISYE 6501 Analytics Modeling Midterm 1
Question and Answer 2026 | Graded
• What do descriptive questions ask? -✓✓What happened? (e.g., which customers are
most alike)
• What do predictive questions ask? -✓✓What will happen? (e.g., what will Google's
stock price be?)
• What do prescriptive questions ask? -✓✓What action(s) would be best? (e.g., where to
put traffic lights)
• What is a model? -✓✓Real-life situation expressed as math.
• What do classifiers help you do? -✓✓differentiate
• What is a soft classifier and when is it used? -✓✓In some cases, there won't be a line
that separates all of the labeled examples. So we use a classifier that minimizes the
number of mistakes.
• What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the
vertical x-axis? -✓✓The horizontal attribute is all that is needed.
• What does it mean when the classifier/decision boundary is almost parallel to the
horizontal y-axis? -✓✓The vertical attribute is all that is needed.
• What is time-series data? -✓✓The same data recorded over time often recorded at
equal intervals
• What is quantitative data? -✓✓Number with a meaning: higher means more, lower
means less (e.g., age, sales, temperature, income)
• What is categorical data? -✓✓Numbers w/o meaning (e.g., zip codes), non-numeric
(e.g., hair color), binary data (e.g., male/female, yes/no, on/off)
• Which of these is time series data?
A. The average cost of a house in the United States every year since 1820
B. The height of each professional basketball player in the NBA at the start of the
season -✓✓A
• Which of these is structured data?
A. The contents of a person's Twitter feed
B. The amount of money in a person's bank account -✓✓B