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May 25'23

Determine which of the following statements is/are true.

  • The number of clusters must be pre-specified for both K-means and hierarchical clustering.
  • The K-means clustering algorithm is less sensitive to the presence of outliers than the hierarchical clustering algorithm.
  • The K-means clustering algorithm requires random assignments while the hierarchical clustering algorithm does not.
  • I only
  • II only
  • III only
  • I, II and II
  • The correct answer is not given by (A), (B), (C), or (D)

Copyright 2023. The Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Illinois. Reproduced with permission.

May 25'23

Determine which of the following statements is applicable to K-means clustering and is not applicable to hierarchical clustering.

  • If two different people are given the same data and perform one iteration of the algorithm, their results at that point will be the same.
  • At each iteration of the algorithm, the number of clusters will be greater than the number of clusters in the previous iteration of the algorithm.
  • The algorithm needs to be run only once, regardless of how many clusters are ultimately decided to use.
  • The algorithm must be initialized with an assignment of the data points to a cluster.
  • None of (A), (B), (C), or (D) meet the meet the stated criterion.

Copyright 2023. The Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Illinois. Reproduced with permission.

May 25'23

You are given a set of n observations, each with p features. Determine which of the following statements is/are true with respect to clustering methods.

  • The n observations can be clustered on the basis of the p features to identify subgroups among the observations.
  • The p features can be clustered on the basis of the n observations to
  • identify subgroups among the features.
  • Clustering is an unsupervised learning method and is often performed as part of an exploratory data analysis.
  • None
  • I and II only
  • I and III only
  • II and III only
  • The correct answer is not given by (A), (B), (C), or (D).

Copyright 2023. The Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Illinois. Reproduced with permission.

May 25'23

Determine which of the following statements is/are true about clustering methods:

  • If K is held constant, K-means clustering will always produce the same cluster assignments.
  • Given a linkage and a dissimilarity measure, hierarchical clustering will always produce the same cluster assignments for a specific number of clusters.
  • Given identical data sets, cutting a dendrogram to obtain five clusters produces the same cluster assignments as K-means clustering with K = 5.
  • I only
  • II only
  • III only
  • I, II and III
  • The correct answer is not given by (A), (B), (C), or (D).

Copyright 2023. The Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Illinois. Reproduced with permission.

May 25'23

Determine which of the following statements about clustering is/are true.

  • Cutting a dendrogram at a lower height will not decrease the number of clusters.
  • K-means clustering requires plotting the data before determining the number of clusters.
  • For a given number of clusters, hierarchical clustering can sometimes yield less accurate results than K-means clustering.
  • None
  • I and II only
  • I and III only
  • II and III only
  • The correct answer is not given by (A), (B), (C), or (D).

Copyright 2023. The Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Illinois. Reproduced with permission.

May 25'23

Determine which of the following statements is NOT true about clustering methods.

  • Clustering is used to discover structure within a data set.
  • Clustering is used to find homogeneous subgroups among the observations within a data set.
  • Clustering is an unsupervised learning method.
  • Clustering is used to reduce the dimensionality of a dataset while retaining explanation for a good fraction of the variance.
  • In K-means clustering, it is necessary to pre-specify the number of clusters.

Copyright 2023. The Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Illinois. Reproduced with permission.