Foundations of Business Data Analytics — Practice

Question 1

Is a company's payroll register structured or unstructured data?

Accepted Answer

Structured data — it fits a fixed, predefined row-and-column format.

Question 2

What measurement scale is a customer's loyalty tier (Bronze, Silver, Gold)?

Accepted Answer

Ordinal — the tiers have a clear order, but the gap between tiers is not a measured, equal quantity.

Question 3

A dashboard showing last month's total revenue is which type of analytics?

Accepted Answer

Descriptive analytics.

Question 4

A customer database has two different spellings of the same company name for the same customer ('ABC Ltd' and 'ABC Limited'). Which data-quality dimension is violated?

Accepted Answer

Consistency (and arguably uniqueness, if the two spellings are treated as two separate customer records rather than one).

Question 5

Explain the purpose of master data management with an example.

Accepted Answer

Master data management maintains one single, authoritative version of a core business entity (such as a customer or product) so that the same entity is represented consistently across all of a company's systems. For example, a single authoritative customer ID prevents the sales system, accounting system and costing system from each holding a slightly different version of the same customer's details.

Question 6

Which of the Big Data 5 Vs specifically addresses whether analysing the data is actually worth the cost of managing it?

Accepted Answer

Value.

Question 7

A hospital finds that patient readmission rates rose 15% this quarter (Report 1), traces the rise to a specific ward with staffing shortages (Report 2), and an analyst proposes a staffing-reallocation model to minimise expected future readmissions (Report 3). Classify each report and explain why the reports must logically follow this order.

Accepted Answer

Report 1 is descriptive (what happened), Report 2 is diagnostic (why it happened), and Report 3 is prescriptive (what to do about it) — note it skips predictive here since it goes directly to a recommended action. The order matters because diagnosing a cause requires first knowing reliably what happened, and a prescriptive recommendation is only trustworthy if it targets a correctly diagnosed cause rather than a superficial symptom.

Question 8

A survey asks respondents to rate satisfaction from 1 to 5 and the analyst reports the mean score as 3.7. Explain the statistical assumption this calculation makes, and why it might not hold.

Accepted Answer

Computing a mean on a 1-5 satisfaction scale assumes the scale is effectively interval — that the gap between each pair of adjacent categories (e.g. 1 to 2, and 4 to 5) is equal. In reality this is an ordinal scale: it only guarantees the ranking order, not equal spacing between categories, so the assumption may not hold and the mean can misrepresent the underlying distribution; the median or modal category is often a more defensible summary.

Practice — Foundations of Business Data Analytics

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