MLS-C01 Question #264: Real Exam Question with Answer & Explanation

Question

An online store is predicting future book sales by using a linear regression model that is based on past sales data. The data includes duration, a numerical feature that represents the number of days that a book has been listed in the online store. A data scientist performs an exploratory data analysis and discovers that the relationship between book sales and duration is skewed and non- linear. Which data transformation step should the data scientist take to improve the predictions of the model?

Options

• AOne-hot encoding
• BCartesian product transformation
• CQuantile binning
• DNormalization

Explanation

{"question_number": 3, "correct_answer": "C", "explanation": "When a numerical feature has a skewed, non-linear relationship with the target variable, quantile binning (C) is the appropriate transformation. Quantile binning divides the feature values into equal-frequency buckets (e.g., quartiles or deciles), effectively converting the continuous skewed variable into an ordinal or one-hot-encoded categorical feature. This removes the assumption of linearity between 'duration' and 'sales' and allows the linear regression model to capture non-linear patterns across different ranges of the feature. One-hot encoding (A) is for categorical features, not continuous numerical ones. Cartesian product transformation (B) creates interaction terms between features but does not address skewness in a single feature. Normalization (D) rescales the range of values but preserves the underlying non-linear distribution and does not address the skewed relationship with the target.", "generated_by": "claude-sonnet", "llm_judge_score": 3}

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