100 Common Questions and Answers for AI Basics


1. Introduction to AI

  1. Q: What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
    • AI is the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn.
  2. Q: What are the main types of AI?
    • The main types are Narrow AI, General AI, and Superintelligent AI.
  3. Q: What is Machine Learning?
    • Machine Learning is a subset of AI that enables systems to learn from data and improve over time without being explicitly programmed.
  4. Q: What is Deep Learning?
    • Deep Learning is a type of Machine Learning that uses neural networks with many layers to analyze complex data.
  5. Q: What is a neural network?
    • A neural network is a series of algorithms that attempt to recognize underlying relationships in a set of data through a process that mimics the way the human brain operates.

2. AI Fields and Applications

  1. Q: What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
    • NLP is a field of AI that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans using natural language.
  2. Q: What is computer vision?
    • Computer vision is a field of AI that trains computers to interpret and understand the visual world.
  3. Q: What is speech recognition?
    • Speech recognition is the process of converting spoken language into text.
  4. Q: What is text-to-speech (TTS)?
    • TTS is the process of converting written text into spoken voice output.
  5. Q: What is optical character recognition (OCR)?
    • OCR is the technology to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents or images, into editable and searchable data.

3. Machine Learning Types

  1. Q: What is supervised learning?
    • Supervised learning is a type of Machine Learning where the model is trained on labeled data.
  2. Q: What is unsupervised learning?
    • Unsupervised learning is a type of Machine Learning where the model finds patterns in unlabeled data.
  3. Q: What is reinforcement learning?
    • Reinforcement learning is a type of Machine Learning where an agent learns to make decisions by performing actions and receiving rewards or penalties.

4. Data and Features

  1. Q: What is an algorithm in AI?
    • An algorithm is a set of rules or instructions given to an AI, computer, or other machine to help it learn on its own.
  2. Q: What is training data?
    • Training data is the dataset used to teach an AI model how to make predictions or decisions.
  3. Q: What is a dataset?
    • A dataset is a collection of data used for training or testing AI models.
  4. Q: What is a label in machine learning?
    • A label is the output or target value that a model is trying to predict.
  5. Q: What is a feature in AI?
    • A feature is an individual measurable property or characteristic of the data being analyzed.
  6. Q: What is feature extraction?
    • Feature extraction is the process of transforming raw data into numerical features that can be processed while preserving the information in the original data.
  7. Q: What is feature selection?
    • Feature selection is the process of selecting the most important variables for use in model construction.
  8. Q: What is feature scaling?
    • Feature scaling is the process of normalizing or standardizing features so they have similar ranges or distributions.
  9. Q: What is one-hot encoding?
    • One-hot encoding is a method to convert categorical variables into a binary matrix for use in machine learning models.
  10. Q: What is data preprocessing in AI?
    • Data preprocessing is the process of cleaning and transforming raw data into a suitable format for a machine learning model.
  11. Q: What is data augmentation?
    • Data augmentation is the process of creating new training samples by modifying existing data, often used in image processing.

5. Model Training and Evaluation

  1. Q: What is a model in AI?
    • A model is a mathematical representation of a real-world process, trained to make predictions or decisions based on data.
  2. Q: What is classification in AI?
    • Classification is the process of predicting the category or class of given data points.
  3. Q: What is regression in AI?
    • Regression is a type of predictive modeling technique that estimates relationships among variables.
  4. Q: What is clustering in AI?
    • Clustering is an unsupervised learning technique that groups similar data points together.
  5. Q: What is a confusion matrix?
    • A confusion matrix is a table used to evaluate the performance of a classification algorithm by comparing predicted and actual values.
  6. Q: What is accuracy in AI?
    • Accuracy is the ratio of correctly predicted observations to the total observations.
  7. Q: What is precision in AI?
    • Precision is the ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to the total predicted positive observations.
  8. Q: What is recall in AI?
    • Recall is the ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to all actual positive observations.
  9. Q: What is F1 score?
    • The F1 score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall, providing a balance between the two metrics.
  10. Q: What is cross-validation?
    • Cross-validation is a technique for assessing how a machine learning model will generalize to an independent dataset.
  11. Q: What is a training set?
    • A training set is a subset of data used to train a machine learning model.
  12. Q: What is a test set?
    • A test set is a subset of data used to evaluate the performance of a trained model.
  13. Q: What is validation set?
    • A validation set is a subset of data used to tune model parameters and prevent overfitting.
  14. Q: What is a loss function?
    • A loss function measures how well a model’s predictions match the actual values.
  15. Q: What is gradient descent?
    • Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm used to minimize the loss function by iteratively adjusting model parameters.
  16. Q: What is backpropagation?
    • Backpropagation is an algorithm for training neural networks by propagating the error backward and updating the weights.
  17. Q: What is an epoch in machine learning?
    • An epoch is one complete pass through the entire training dataset during the training process.
  18. Q: What is batch size?
    • Batch size is the number of training samples processed before the model’s internal parameters are updated.
  19. Q: What is a hyperparameter?
    • A hyperparameter is a configuration value set before training a model, such as learning rate or number of layers.
  20. Q: What is regularization in AI?
    • Regularization is a technique used to prevent overfitting by adding a penalty to the loss function.
  21. Q: What is dropout in neural networks?
    • Dropout is a regularization technique where randomly selected neurons are ignored during training to prevent overfitting.
  22. Q: What is a learning rate in machine learning?
    • The learning rate is a hyperparameter that controls how much the model’s weights are updated during training.
  23. Q: What is a validation curve?
    • A validation curve is a plot that shows how a model’s performance varies with changes in a hyperparameter.
  24. Q: What is early stopping?
    • Early stopping is a technique to stop training when a model’s performance on a validation set starts to degrade, preventing overfitting.

6. Algorithms and Techniques

  1. Q: What is a decision tree?
    • A decision tree is a model that makes decisions by splitting data into branches based on feature values.
  2. Q: What is an ensemble method?
    • Ensemble methods combine predictions from multiple models to improve accuracy and robustness.
  3. Q: What is bagging in machine learning?
    • Bagging (Bootstrap Aggregating) is an ensemble technique that trains multiple models on random subsets of the data and averages their predictions.
  4. Q: What is boosting in machine learning?
    • Boosting is an ensemble technique that trains models sequentially, each focusing on correcting the errors of the previous one.
  5. Q: What is a random forest?
    • A random forest is an ensemble of decision trees, often used for classification and regression tasks.
  6. Q: What is a support vector machine (SVM)?
    • SVM is a supervised learning algorithm used for classification and regression by finding the best boundary between classes.
  7. Q: What is a k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm?
    • KNN is a simple algorithm that classifies data points based on the majority class among their k closest neighbors.
  8. Q: What is principal component analysis (PCA)?
    • PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that transforms data into a set of uncorrelated variables called principal components.
  9. Q: What is transfer learning?
    • Transfer learning is a technique where a model developed for one task is reused as the starting point for a model on a second task.
  10. Q: What is a generative model?
    • A generative model is a type of model that can generate new data samples similar to the training data.
  11. Q: What is a discriminative model?
    • A discriminative model is a type of model that distinguishes between different classes of data.
  12. Q: What is zero-shot learning?
    • Zero-shot learning is the ability of a model to recognize objects or concepts it has never seen before.
  13. Q: What is few-shot learning?
    • Few-shot learning is the ability of a model to learn from a very small amount of labeled data.
  14. Q: What is continual learning?
    • Continual learning is the ability of a model to learn continuously from new data without forgetting previous knowledge.

7. Deep Learning Architectures

  1. Q: What is a convolutional neural network (CNN)?
    • A CNN is a type of deep learning model especially effective for image and video recognition tasks.
  2. Q: What is a recurrent neural network (RNN)?
    • An RNN is a neural network designed for sequential data, such as time series or natural language.
  3. Q: What is a long short-term memory (LSTM) network?
    • LSTM is a type of RNN that can learn long-term dependencies in sequential data.
  4. Q: What is a generative adversarial network (GAN)?
    • A GAN is a model with two neural networks (generator and discriminator) that compete to generate realistic data.
  5. Q: What is a transformer model?
    • A transformer is a deep learning model architecture that uses self-attention mechanisms, widely used in NLP.
  6. Q: What is attention mechanism in AI?
    • Attention allows models to focus on relevant parts of the input when making predictions.
  7. Q: What is word embedding?
    • Word embedding is a technique to represent words as dense vectors capturing semantic meaning.
  8. Q: What is BERT?
    • BERT is a transformer-based model for NLP tasks, pre-trained on large text corpora.
  9. Q: What is GPT?
    • GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a language model that generates human-like text.

8. Computer Vision Tasks

  1. Q: What is image classification?
    • Image classification is the task of assigning a label to an image from a set of categories.
  2. Q: What is object detection?
    • Object detection identifies and locates objects within an image.
  3. Q: What is semantic segmentation?
    • Semantic segmentation classifies each pixel in an image into a category.
  4. Q: What is anomaly detection?
    • Anomaly detection is the identification of rare items, events, or observations that differ significantly from the majority of the data.

9. Model Deployment and Production

  1. Q: What is model evaluation?
    • Model evaluation is the process of assessing how well a trained model performs on unseen data.
  2. Q: What is model deployment?
    • Model deployment is the process of integrating a trained model into a production environment to make real-world predictions.
  3. Q: What is a pipeline in machine learning?
    • A pipeline is a sequence of data processing and modeling steps applied to data.
  4. Q: What is a baseline model?
    • A baseline model is a simple model used as a reference point for evaluating more complex models.
  5. Q: What is hyperparameter tuning?
    • Hyperparameter tuning is the process of finding the best configuration values for a machine learning model.
  6. Q: What is AutoML?
    • AutoML is the process of automating the end-to-end process of applying machine learning to real-world problems.

10. Reinforcement Learning

  1. Q: What is an agent in AI?
    • An agent is an entity that perceives its environment and takes actions to achieve a goal.
  2. Q: What is an environment in reinforcement learning?
    • The environment is everything the agent interacts with and tries to learn from in reinforcement learning.
  3. Q: What is a reward in reinforcement learning?
    • A reward is feedback from the environment that tells the agent how good its action was.
  4. Q: What is a policy in reinforcement learning?
    • A policy is a strategy used by the agent to decide which action to take in a given state.
  5. Q: What is Q-learning?
    • Q-learning is a reinforcement learning algorithm that learns the value of actions in states to maximize rewards.
  6. Q: What is a Markov Decision Process (MDP)?
    • An MDP is a mathematical framework for modeling decision-making with states, actions, rewards, and transitions.
  7. Q: What is reinforcement learning used for?
    • Reinforcement learning is used for training agents to make sequences of decisions, such as in robotics or game playing.

11. AI Ethics, Fairness, and Privacy

  1. Q: What is AI bias?
    • AI bias occurs when an AI system produces prejudiced results due to biased data or algorithms.
  2. Q: What is fairness in AI?
    • Fairness in AI means ensuring that AI systems make decisions impartially and do not discriminate against individuals or groups.
  3. Q: What is data privacy in AI?
    • Data privacy in AI involves protecting personal or sensitive information used in AI systems.
  4. Q: What is explainable AI (XAI)?
    • XAI refers to methods and techniques that make the results of AI models understandable to humans.
  5. Q: What is model interpretability?
    • Model interpretability refers to how easily a human can understand the decisions or predictions made by a model.

  1. Q: What is federated learning?
    • Federated learning is a technique where multiple devices collaboratively train a model without sharing raw data.
  2. Q: What is edge AI?
    • Edge AI refers to running AI algorithms locally on a hardware device rather than in a centralized data center.
  3. Q: What is cloud AI?
    • Cloud AI refers to using cloud computing resources to train, deploy, and manage AI models.

13. AI History and Benchmarks

  1. Q: What is the Turing Test?
    • The Turing Test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.