quiz.json

[
  {
    "id": "anomaly-pre-1",
    "stage": "pre",
    "question": "Why is anomaly detection typically framed as an unsupervised problem rather than classification?",
    "options": [
      "Anomaly detection does not require any data",
      "Labeled anomalies are extremely rare, and novel anomaly types differ from previously seen ones",
      "Supervised classification is always less accurate",
      "Anomaly detection only works on time series data"
    ],
    "correct": 1,
    "explanation": "Anomalies are rare (often <0.1% of data), so there are too few labeled examples to train a classifier. Also, future anomalies may be of types never seen before. Modeling 'normal' and flagging deviations handles both problems."
  },
  {
    "id": "anomaly-pre-2",
    "stage": "pre",
    "question": "A temperature of 90F is normal in summer but anomalous in winter. What type of anomaly is this?",
    "options": [
      "Point anomaly",
      "Contextual anomaly",
      "Collective anomaly",
      "Statistical anomaly"
    ],
    "correct": 1,
    "explanation": "A contextual anomaly is a value that is unusual given its context (time, location). The value itself might be normal in a different context. Same data point, different interpretation based on surrounding conditions."
  },
  {
    "id": "anomaly-post-1",
    "stage": "post",
    "question": "The Z-score method flags points more than 3 standard deviations from the mean. When does this approach fail?",
    "options": [
      "When the data is perfectly normally distributed",
      "When the data is multimodal, skewed, or when outliers in the training data inflate the mean and std",
      "When there are exactly 3 anomalies in the dataset",
      "When the features are standardized"
    ],
    "correct": 1,
    "explanation": "Z-score assumes a single Gaussian distribution. It fails on multimodal data (multiple clusters), skewed distributions, and when outliers in training data shift the mean/std, making real anomalies harder to detect."
  },
  {
    "id": "anomaly-post-2",
    "stage": "post",
    "question": "How does Isolation Forest detect anomalies differently from distance-based methods?",
    "options": [
      "It uses neural networks instead of trees",
      "It isolates points using random splits; anomalies require fewer splits to isolate because they are few and different",
      "It computes distances to every other point in the dataset",
      "It only works on text data"
    ],
    "correct": 1,
    "explanation": "Isolation Forest randomly partitions data with tree splits. Anomalies, being rare and different, end up isolated (in their own leaf) with fewer splits. Short average path length = more anomalous."
  },
  {
    "id": "anomaly-post-3",
    "stage": "post",
    "question": "You build both an unsupervised anomaly detector and a supervised fraud classifier. When should you prefer the unsupervised approach?",
    "options": [
      "Always -- unsupervised is always better for anomaly detection",
      "When you need to detect novel fraud patterns that differ from historical labeled examples",
      "When you have millions of labeled fraud examples",
      "When you only care about precision, not recall"
    ],
    "correct": 1,
    "explanation": "Supervised classifiers only catch fraud types present in training data. Unsupervised detectors flag any deviation from normal, catching novel fraud schemes. The tradeoff is higher false positive rate."
  }
]