Professional-Machine-Learning-Engineer Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Recall is the ratio of true positives to the sum of true positives and false negatives. It measures how well the model can identify all the relevant cases. In this scenario, the relevant cases are the pictures that do not meet the profile photo requirements. Therefore, minimizing false negatives means minimizing the cases where the model incorrectly predicts that a non-compliant picture meets the requirements. By using AutoML to optimize the model’s recall, the model will be more likely to reject a non-compliant picture and inform the user accordingly. References:

[AutoML Vision] is a service that allows you to train custom ML models for image classification and object detection tasks. You can use AutoML to optimize your model for different metrics, such as recall, precision, or F1 score.

[Recall] is one of the evaluation metrics for ML models. It is defined as TP / (TP + FN), where TP is the number of true positives and FN is the number of false negatives. Recall measures how well the model can identify all the relevant cases. A high recall means that the model has a low rate of false negatives.

Option A is incorrect because creating a collaborative filtering system that recommends articles to a user based on the user’s past behavior is not the best approach to suggest articles that are similar to the articles they are currently reading. Collaborative filtering is a method of recommendation that uses the ratings or preferences of other users to predict the preferences of a target user1. However, this method does not consider the content or features of the articles, and may not be able to find articles that are similar in terms of topic, style, or sentiment.

Option B is correct because encoding all articles into vectors using word2vec, and building a model that returns articles based on vector similarity is a suitable approach to suggest articles that are similar to the articles they are currently reading. Word2vec is a technique that learns low-dimensional and dense representations of words from a large corpus of text, such that words that are semantically similar have similar vectors2. By applying word2vec to the articles, we can obtain vector representations of the articles that capture their meaning and usage. Then, we can use a similarity measure, such as cosine similarity, to find articles that have similar vectors to the current article3.

Option C is incorrect because building a logistic regression model for each user that predicts whether an article should be recommended to a user is not a feasible approach to suggest articles that are similar to the articles they are currently reading. Logistic regression is a supervised learning method that models the probability of a binary outcome (such as recommend or not) based on some input features (such as user profile or article content)4. However, this method requires a large amount of labeled data for each user, which may not be available or scalable. Moreover, this method does not directly measure the similarity between articles, but rather the likelihood of a user’s preference.

Option D is incorrect because manually labeling a few hundred articles, and then training an SVM classifier based on the manually classified articles that categorizes additional articles into their respective categories is not an effective approach to suggest articles that are similar to the articles they are currently reading. SVM (support vector machine) is a supervised learning method that finds a hyperplane that separates the data into different classes (such as news categories) with the maximum margin5. However, this method also requires a large amount of labeled data, which may be costly and time-consuming to obtain. Moreover, this method does not account for the fine-grained similarity between articles within the same category, or the cross-category similarity between articles from different categories.

References:

Collaborative filtering

Word2vec

Cosine similarity

Logistic regression

SVM

 The input/output execution performance of a TensorFlow model depends on how efficiently the model can read and process the data from the data source. Reading and processing data from CSV files can be slow and inefficient, especially if the data is large and distributed. Therefore, to improve the input/output execution performance, one should use a more suitable data format and storage system.

One of the best options for improving the input/output execution performance is to convert the CSV files into shards of TFRecords, and store the data in Cloud Storage. TFRecord is a binary data format that can store a sequence of serialized TensorFlow examples. TFRecord has several advantages over CSV, such as:

Faster data loading: TFRecord can be read and processed faster than CSV, as it avoids the overhead of parsing and decoding the text data. TFRecord also supports compression and checksums, which can reduce the data size and ensure data integrity1

Better performance: TFRecord can improve the performance of the model, as it allows the model to access the data in a sequential and streaming manner, and leverage the tf.data API to build efficient data pipelines. TFRecord also supports sharding and interleaving, which can increase the parallelism and throughput of the data processing2

Easier integration: TFRecord can integrate seamlessly with TensorFlow, as it is the native data format for TensorFlow. TFRecord also supports various types of data, such as images, text, audio, and video, and can store the data schema and metadata along with the data3

Cloud Storage is a scalable and reliable object storage service that can store any amount of data. Cloud Storage has several advantages over other storage systems, such as:

High availability: Cloud Storage can provide high availability and durability for the data, as it replicates the data across multiple regions and zones, and supports versioning and lifecycle management. Cloud Storage also offers various storage classes, such as Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive, to meet different performance and cost requirements4

Low latency: Cloud Storage can provide low latency and high bandwidth for the data, as it supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols, and integrates with other Google Cloud services, such as AI Platform, Dataflow, and BigQuery. Cloud Storage also supports resumable uploads and downloads, and parallel composite uploads, which can improve the data transfer speed and reliability5

Easy access: Cloud Storage can provide easy access and management for the data, as it supports various tools and libraries, such as gsutil, Cloud Console, and Cloud Storage Client Libraries. Cloud Storage also supports fine-grained access control and encryption, which can ensure the data security and privacy.

The other options are not as effective or feasible. Loading the data into BigQuery and reading the data from BigQuery is not recommended, as BigQuery is mainly designed for analytical queries on large-scale data, and does not support streaming or real-time data processing. Loading the data into Cloud Bigtable and reading the data from Bigtable is not ideal, as Cloud Bigtable is mainly designed for low-latency and high-throughput key-value operations on sparse and wide tables, and does not support complex data types or schemas. Converting the CSV files into shards of TFRecords and storing the data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is not optimal, as HDFS is not natively supported by TensorFlow, and requires additional configuration and dependencies, such as Hadoop, Spark, or Beam.

References: 1: TFRecord and tf.Example 2: Better performance with the tf.data API 3: TensorFlow Data Validation 4: Cloud Storage overview 5: Performance : [How-to guides]

To organize the artifacts for dozens of pipelines, you should store the parameters in Vertex ML Metadata, store the models’ source code in GitHub, and store the models’ binaries in Cloud Storage. This option has the following advantages:

Vertex ML Metadata is a service that helps you track and manage the metadata of your ML workflows, such as datasets, models, metrics, and parameters1. It can also help you with data lineage, model versioning, and model performance monitoring2.

GitHub is a popular platform for hosting and collaborating on code repositories. It can help you manage the source code of your models, as well as the configuration files, scripts, and notebooks that are part of your ML pipelines3.

Cloud Storage is a scalable and durable object storage service that can store any type of data, including model binaries4. It can also integrate with other services, such as Vertex AI, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run, to enable easy deployment and serving of your models5.

References:

1: Introduction to Vertex ML Metadata | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

2: Manage metadata for ML workflows | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

3: GitHub - Where the world builds software

4: Cloud Storage | Google Cloud

5: Deploying models | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Model retraining is the process of updating an existing machine learning model with new data and parameters to improve its performance and accuracy. Model retraining is essential for maintaining the relevance and validity of the model, especially when the data or the environment changes over time. Model retraining can help to avoid or reduce the effects of model degradation, which is the phenomenon of the model’s predictive performance decreasing as it is tested on new datasets within rapidly evolving environments1.

For the use case of predicting sales numbers, model accuracy is crucial, because the production model is required to keep up with market changes. Market changes can affect the demand, supply, price, and preference of the products, and thus influence the sales numbers. If the model is not retrained with new data that reflects the market changes, it may become outdated and inaccurate, and fail to capture the patterns and trends of the sales numbers. Therefore, the most likely issue that is causing the steady decline in model accuracy is the lack of model retraining.

The other options are not as likely as option B, because they are not directly related to the model’s ability to adapt to market changes. Option A, poor data quality, may affect the model’s accuracy, but it is not a specific cause of model degradation over time. Option C, too few layers in the model for capturing information, may affect the model’s complexity and expressiveness, but it is not a specific cause of model degradation over time. Option D, incorrect data split ratio during model training, evaluation, validation, and test, may affect the model’s generalization and validation, but it is not a specific cause of model degradation over time. Therefore, option B, lack of model retraining, is the best answer for this question.

References:

Beware Steep Decline: Understanding Model Degradation In Machine Learning Models

 Before building an insurance approval model, an ML engineer should consider the factors of traceability, reproducibility, and explainability, as these are important aspects of responsible AI and fairness in a regulated domain. Traceability is the ability to track the provenance and lineage of the data, models, and decisions throughout the ML lifecycle. It helps to ensure the quality, reliability, and accountability of the ML system, and to comply with the regulatory and ethical standards. Reproducibility is the ability to recreate the same results and outcomes using the same data, models, and parameters. It helps to verify the validity, consistency, and robustness of the ML system, and to debug and improve the performance. Explainability is the ability to understand and interpret the logic, behavior, and outcomes of the ML system. It helps to increase the transparency, trust, and confidence of the ML system, and to identify and mitigate any potential biases, errors, or risks. The other options are not as relevant or comprehensive as this option. Redaction is the process of removing sensitive or confidential information from the data or documents, but it is not a factor that the ML engineer should consider before building the model, as it is more related to the data preparation and protection. Federated learning is a technique that allows training ML models on decentralized data without transferring the data to a central server, but it is not a factor that the ML engineer should consider before building the model, as it is more related to the model architecture and privacy preservation. Differential privacy is a method that adds noise to the data or the model outputs to protect the individual privacy of the data subjects, but it is not a factor that the ML engineer should consider before building the model, as it is more related to the model evaluation and deployment. References:

Responsible AI documentation

Traceability documentation

Reproducibility documentation

Explainability documentation

Option A is not the best answer because it requires modifying the pipeline to use the Vertex AI Feature Store, which may not be feasible or necessary for recovering the data that the model was trained on. The Vertex AI Feature Store is a service that helps you manage, store, and serve feature values for your machine learning models1, but it is not designed for storing the raw data or the TFRecord files.

Option B is the best answer because it leverages the lineage feature of Vertex AI Metadata, which is a service that helps you track and manage the metadata of your machine learning workflows, such as datasets, models, metrics, and parameters2. The lineage feature allows you to view the relationships and dependencies among the artifacts and executions in your pipeline, and trace back the origin and history of any artifact3. By using the lineage feature, you can find the model artifact, determine the version of the model, identify the step that creates the data copy, and search in the metadata for its location.

Option C is not the best answer because it relies on the logging features in the Vertex AI endpoint, which may not be accurate or reliable for finding the data copy. The logging features in the Vertex AI endpoint help you monitor and troubleshoot the online predictions made by your deployed models, but they do not provide information about the training data or the pipeline steps4. Moreover, the timestamp of the model deployment may not match the timestamp of the pipeline run, as there may be delays or errors in the deployment process.

Option D is not the best answer because it requires finding the job ID in Vertex AI Training, which may not be easy or straightforward. Vertex AI Training is a service that helps you train your custom models on Google Cloud, but it does not provide a direct way to link the training job to the model version or the pipeline run. Moreover, searching in the logs of the job may not reveal the location of the data copy, as the logs may only contain information about the training process and the metrics.

References:

1: Introduction to Vertex AI Feature Store | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

2: Introduction to Vertex AI Metadata | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

3: View lineage for ML workflows | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

4: Monitor online predictions | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

[5]: Train custom models | Vertex AI | Google Cloud

Kubeflow Pipelines is a service that allows you to create and run machine learning workflows on Google Cloud using various features, model architectures, and hyperparameters. You can use Kubeflow Pipelines to scale up your workflows, leverage distributed training, and access specialized hardware such as GPUs and TPUs1. An experiment in Kubeflow Pipelines is a workspace where you can try different configurations of your pipelines and organize your runs into logical groups. You can use experiments to compare the performance of different models and track the evaluation metrics in the same dashboard2.

For the use case of designing a customized deep neural network in Keras that will predict customer purchases based on their purchase history, the best option is to create an experiment in Kubeflow Pipelines to organize multiple runs. This option allows you to explore model performance using multiple model architectures, store training data, and compare the evaluation metrics in the same dashboard. You can use Keras to build and train your deep neural network models, and then package them as pipeline components that can be reused and combined with other components. You can also use Kubeflow Pipelines SDK to define and submit your pipelines programmatically, and use Kubeflow Pipelines UI to monitor and manage your experiments. Therefore, creating an experiment in Kubeflow Pipelines to organize multiple runs is the best option for this use case.

References:

Kubeflow Pipelines documentation

Experiment | Kubeflow

AutoML Translation is a service that allows you to create and train custom ML models for translating text between different languages. You can use AutoML Translation to train a model that can translate instruction manuals for scientific products to 15 different languages. You can also use Translation Hub to configure a project and use the trained model to translate the documents. Translation Hub is a service that allows you to manage and automate your translation workflows on Google Cloud. You can use Translation Hub to upload the documents to a Cloud Storage bucket, select the source and target languages, and apply the trained model to translate the documents. You can also use Translation Hub to download the translated documents or save them to another Cloud Storage bucket. You can also use human reviewers to evaluate the incorrect translations. Human reviewers are people who can review and correct the translations produced by the ML model. You can use human reviewers to improve the quality and accuracy of the translations, and provide feedback to the ML model. You can use Translation Hub to integrate with third-party human review services, such as Google Translate Community or Appen. By using AutoML Translation, Translation Hub, and human reviewers, you can implement a scalable solution that maximizes accuracy and minimizes operational overhead. You can also include a process to evaluate and fix incorrect translations. References:

[AutoML Translation documentation]

[Translation Hub documentation]

[Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate]

According to the official exam guide1, one of the skills assessed in the exam is to “explain the predictions of a trained model”. Vertex AI provides feature attributions using Shapley Values, a cooperative game theory algorithm that assigns credit to each feature in a model for a particular outcome2. Feature attributions can help you understand how the model calculates the predictions and debug or optimize the model accordingly. You can use AutoML for Tabular Data to generate and query local feature attributions3. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide

Feature attributions for classification and regression

AutoML for Tabular Data

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

 Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying and extracting the emotions, opinions, and attitudes expressed in a text or speech. Sentiment analysis can help businesses understand their customers’ feedback, satisfaction, and preferences. There are different approaches to building a sentiment analysis tool, depending on the input data and the output format. Some of the common approaches are:

Extracting sentiment directly from the voice recordings: This approach involves using acoustic features, such as pitch, intensity, and prosody, to infer the sentiment of the speaker. This approach can capture the nuances and subtleties of the vocal expression, but it also requires a large and diverse dataset of labeled voice recordings, which may not be easily available or accessible. Moreover, this approach may not account for the semantic and contextual information of the speech, which can also affect the sentiment.

Converting the speech to text and building a model based on the words: This approach involves using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe the voice recordings into text, and then using lexical features, such as word frequency, polarity, and valence, to infer the sentiment of the text. This approach can leverage the existing text-based sentiment analysis models and tools, but it also introduces some challenges, such as the accuracy and reliability of the ASR system, the ambiguity and variability of the natural language, and the loss of the acoustic information of the speech.

Converting the speech to text and extracting sentiments based on the sentences: This approach involves using ASR to transcribe the voice recordings into text, and then using syntactic and semantic features, such as sentence structure, word order, and meaning, to infer the sentiment of the text. This approach can capture the higher-level and complex aspects of the natural language, such as negation, sarcasm, and irony, which can affect the sentiment. However, this approach also requires more sophisticated and advanced natural language processing techniques, such as parsing, dependency analysis, and semantic role labeling, which may not be readily available or easy to implement.

Converting the speech to text and extracting sentiment using syntactical analysis: This approach involves using ASR to transcribe the voice recordings into text, and then using syntactical analysis, such as part-of-speech tagging, phrase chunking, and constituency parsing, to infer the sentiment of the text. This approach can identify the grammatical and structural elements of the natural language, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and clauses, which can indicate the sentiment. However, this approach may not account for the pragmatic and contextual information of the speech, such as the speaker’s intention, tone, and situation, which can also influence the sentiment.

For the use case of building a sentiment analysis tool that predicts customer sentiment from recorded phone conversations, the best approach is to convert the speech to text and extract sentiments based on the sentences. This approach can balance the trade-offs between the accuracy, complexity, and feasibility of the sentiment analysis tool, while ensuring that the gender, age, and cultural differences of the customers who called the contact center do not impact any stage of the model development pipeline and results. This approach can also handle different types and levels of sentiment, such as polarity (positive, negative, or neutral), intensity (strong or weak), and emotion (anger, joy, sadness, etc.). Therefore, converting the speech to text and extracting sentiments based on the sentences is the best approach for this use case.

Option A is incorrect because using batch prediction mode instead of online mode does not solve the “Out of Memory” error, but rather changes the latency and throughput of the prediction service. Batch prediction mode is suitable for large-scale, asynchronous, and non-urgent predictions, while online prediction mode is suitable for low-latency, synchronous, and real-time predictions1.

Option B is correct because sending the request again with a smaller batch of instances can reduce the memory consumption of the prediction service and avoid the “Out of Memory” error. The batch size is the number of instances that are processed together in one request. A smaller batch size means less data to load into memory at once2.

Option C is incorrect because using base64 to encode your data before using it for prediction does not reduce the memory consumption of the prediction service, but rather increases it. Base64 encoding is a way of representing binary data as ASCII characters, which increases the size of the data by about 33%3. Base64 encoding is only required for certain data types, such as images and audio, that cannot be represented as JSON or CSV4.

Option D is incorrect because applying for a quota increase for the number of prediction requests does not solve the “Out of Memory” error, but rather increases the number of requests that can be sent to the prediction service per day. Quotas are limits on the usage of Google Cloud resources, such as CPU, memory, disk, and network5. Quotas do not affect the performance of the prediction service, but rather the availability and cost of the service.

References:

Choosing between online and batch prediction

Online prediction input data

Base64 encoding

Preparing data for prediction

Quotas and limits

 Oversampling is a technique for dealing with imbalanced datasets, where the majority class dominates the minority class. It balances the distribution of classes by increasing the number of samples in the minority class. Oversampling can improve the performance of a classifier by reducing the bias towards the majority class and increasing the sensitivity to the minority class.

In this case, the dataset includes transactions, of which 1% are identified as fraudulent. This means that the fraudulent transactions are the minority class and the non-fraudulent transactions are the majority class. A random forest model trained on this dataset might have a low recall for the fraudulent transactions, meaning that it might miss many of them and fail to detect fraud. This could have a high cost for the bank and its customers.

One way to overcome this problem is to oversample the fraudulent transactions 10 times, meaning that each fraudulent transaction is duplicated 10 times in the training dataset. This would increase the proportion of fraudulent transactions from 1% to about 10%, making the dataset more balanced. This would also make the random forest model more aware of the patterns and features that distinguish fraudulent transactions from non-fraudulent ones, and thus improve its accuracy and recall for the minority class.

For more information about oversampling and other techniques for imbalanced data, see the following references:

Random Oversampling and Undersampling for Imbalanced Classification

Exploring Oversampling Techniques for Imbalanced Datasets

According to the web search results, RunInference API1 is a feature of Apache Beam that enables you to run models as part of your pipeline in a way that is optimized for machine learning inference. RunInference API supports features like batching, caching, and model reloading. RunInference API can be used with various frameworks, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Sklearn, XGBoost, ONNX, and TensorRT1. Dataflow2 is a fully managed service for running Apache Beam pipelines on Google Cloud. Dataflow handles the provisioning and management of the compute resources, as well as the optimization and execution of the pipelines. Therefore, option D is the best way to reconfigure the architecture for the given use case, as it allows you to use the RunInference API with watchFilePattern in a Dataflow job that wraps around the model and serves predictions. This way, you can minimize prediction latency and the effort required to update the model, as the RunInference API will automatically reload the model from the Cloud Storage bucket whenever there is a change in the model file1. The other options are not relevant or optimal for this scenario. References:

RunInference API

Dataflow

Google Professional Machine Learning Certification Exam 2023

Latest Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Actual Free Exam Questions

 Entity extraction is a natural language processing (NLP) task that involves identifying and extracting specific types of information from text, such as names, dates, locations, etc. Entity extraction can help you analyze a corpus of recipes and extract each ingredient and cookware mentioned in them. Vertex AI is a unified platform for building and managing machine learning solutions on Google Cloud. It provides a service for AutoML entity extraction, which allows you to create and train custom entity extraction models without writing any code. You can use Vertex AI to create a text dataset for entity extraction, and label your data with two entities: “ingredient” and “cookware”. You need to label at least 200 examples of each entity type to train an AutoML entity extraction model. You can also use a holdout dataset to evaluate the performance of your model, such as precision, recall, and F1-score. This solution can help you build a machine learning model to scan a corpus of recipes and extract each ingredient and cookware mentioned in them, and use the results to help users with meal planning. References:

AutoML Entity Extraction | Vertex AI

Preparing data for AutoML Entity Extraction | Vertex AI

 The best option for monitoring the model to determine when retraining is necessary is to schedule a weekly query in BigQuery to compute the success metric. This option has the following advantages:

It allows the model performance to be evaluated regularly, based on the actual outcome of the recommendations. By computing the success metric, which is the percentage of articles that are opened within two days and read for at least one minute, you can measure how well the model is achieving its objective and compare it with the acceptable baseline.

It leverages the scalability and efficiency of BigQuery, which is a serverless, fully managed, and highly scalable data warehouse that can run complex queries over petabytes of data in seconds. By using BigQuery, you can access and analyze all the information needed to compute the success metric, such as the newsletter publication date, the article opening date, and the user reading time, without worrying about the infrastructure or the cost.

It simplifies the model monitoring and retraining workflow, as the weekly query can be scheduled and executed automatically using BigQuery’s built-in scheduling feature. You can also set up alerts or notifications to inform you when the success metric falls below the acceptable baseline, and trigger the model retraining process accordingly.

The other options are less optimal for the following reasons:

Option A: Using Vertex AI Model Monitoring to detect skew of the input features with a sample rate of 100% and a monitoring frequency of two days introduces additional complexity and overhead. This option requires setting up and managing a Vertex AI Model Monitoring service, which is a managed service that provides various tools and features for machine learning, such as training, tuning, serving, and monitoring. However, using Vertex AI Model Monitoring to detect skew of the input features may not reflect the actual performance of the model, as skew is the discrepancy between the distributions of the features in the training dataset and the serving data, which may not affect the outcome of the recommendations. Moreover, using a sample rate of 100% and a monitoring frequency of two days may incur unnecessary cost and latency, as it requires analyzing all the input features every two days, which may not be needed for the model monitoring.

Option B: Scheduling a cron job in Cloud Tasks to retrain the model every week before the newsletter is created introduces additional cost and risk. This option requires creating and running a cron job in Cloud Tasks, which is a fully managed service that allows you to schedule and execute tasks that are invoked by HTTP requests. However, using Cloud Tasks to retrain the model every week may not be optimal, as it may retrain the model more often than necessary, wasting compute resources and cost. Moreover, using Cloud Tasks to retrain the model before the newsletter is created may introduce risk, as it may deploy a new model version that has not been tested or validated, potentially affecting the quality of the recommendations.

Option D: Scheduling a daily Dataflow job in Cloud Composer to compute the success metric introduces additional complexity and cost. This option requires creating and running a Dataflow job in Cloud Composer, which is a fully managed service that runs Apache Airflow pipelines for workflow orchestration. Dataflow is a fully managed service that runs Apache Beam pipelines for data processing and transformation. However, using Dataflow and Cloud Composer to compute the success metric may not be necessary, as it may add more steps and overhead to the model monitoring process. Moreover, using Dataflow and Cloud Composer to compute the success metric daily may not be optimal, as it may compute the success metric more often than needed, consuming more compute resources and cost.

References:

[BigQuery documentation]

[Vertex AI Model Monitoring documentation]

[Cloud Tasks documentation]

[Cloud Composer documentation]

[Dataflow documentation]

Option A is incorrect because using latitude, longitude, and product type as features, and using profit as model output is not the best way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option does not capture the interaction between latitude and longitude, which may affect the profitability of the product. For example, the same product may have different profitability in different regions, depending on the climate, culture, or preferences of the customers. Moreover, this option does not account for the granularity of the location data, which may be too fine or too coarse for the model. For example, using the exact coordinates of a city may not be meaningful, as the profitability may vary within the city, or using the country name may not be informative, as the profitability may vary across the country.

Option B is incorrect because using latitude, longitude, and product type as features, and using revenue and expenses as model outputs is not a suitable way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option has the same drawbacks as option A, as it does not capture the interaction between latitude and longitude, or account for the granularity of the location data. Moreover, this option does not directly predict the profitability of the product, which is the target variable of interest. Instead, it predicts the revenue and expenses of the product, which are intermediate variables that depend on other factors, such as the price, the cost, or the demand of the product. To obtain the profitability, we would need to subtract the expenses from the revenue, which may introduce errors or uncertainties in the prediction.

Option C is correct because using product type and the feature cross of latitude with longitude, followed by binning, as features, and using profit as model output is a good way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option captures the interaction between latitude and longitude, which may affect the profitability of the product, by creating a feature cross of these two features. A feature cross is a synthetic feature that combines the values of two or more features into a single feature1. This option also accounts for the granularity of the location data, by binning the feature cross into discrete buckets. Binning is a technique that groups continuous values into intervals, which can reduce the noise and complexity of the data2. Moreover, this option directly predicts the profitability of the product, which is the target variable of interest, by using it as the model output.

Option D is incorrect because using product type and the feature cross of latitude with longitude, followed by binning, as features, and using revenue and expenses as model outputs is not a valid way to develop an ML model to predict the company’s profitability for a new line of naturally flavored bottled waters in different locations. This option has the same advantages as option C, as it captures the interaction between latitude and longitude, and accounts for the granularity of the location data, by creating a feature cross and binning it. However, this option does not directly predict the profitability of the product, which is the target variable of interest, but rather predicts the revenue and expenses of the product, which are intermediate variables that depend on other factors, as explained in option B.

References:

Feature cross

Binning

[Profitability]

[Revenue and expenses]

[Latitude and longitude]

[Product type]