10 free, exam-style CAP-Essentials (Certified Analytics Professional - Essentials) (CAP-E) (CAP-E) practice questions with answers and
explanations. No signup required. Work through them below, then take the
full free CAP-E practice test to study every exam domain.
These 10 free CAP-E questions are organized by exam domain, so you can see how each part of the CAP-Essentials (Certified Analytics Professional - Essentials) (CAP-E) blueprint is tested. Reveal the answer and explanation under each question.
Domain 1: Business Problem (Question) Framing 15% of exam
Question 1
A sponsor tells an analytics team, "Build me a dashboard to fix our declining sales." Before doing anything else, the analyst's FIRST step should be to:
- Work with the sponsor to define a clear, agreed-upon statement of the business problem
- Start pulling historical sales data from the warehouse so the work can begin right away
- Select a visualization tool and begin designing the layout of the dashboard
- Build a predictive model to forecast where sales are heading over the next quarter
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A - Work with the sponsor to define a clear, agreed-upon statement of the business problem
Question 2
In a RACI matrix used to organize stakeholders for an analytics project, the person who is ultimately answerable for the outcome and of whom there should be exactly one is the:
- Responsible party
- Consulted party
- Accountable party
- Informed party
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C - Accountable party
Domain 2: Analytics Problem Framing 16% of exam
Question 3
A business problem is reformulated as: "Predict which customers will cancel their subscription in the next 30 days." In this analytics problem, the customer's cancellation status is the:
- Independent variable
- Dependent variable
- Constraint
- Baseline measure
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B - Dependent variable
Question 4
Before deploying a new model intended to improve on-time delivery, a team measures the current on-time rate under the existing process. The PRIMARY reason for capturing this figure is to:
- Establish a reference point against which the solution's later improvement can be measured
- Satisfy an external regulatory requirement that mandates this kind of documentation
- Determine which specific machine learning algorithm the team ought to select
- Identify the full set of independent variables that will feed into the model
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A - Establish a reference point against which the solution's later improvement can be measured
Question 5
During analytics problem framing, an analyst notes that the model must run on data available by 6:00 a.m. daily and cannot use protected demographic attributes. These are BEST described as the project's:
- Measures that define what a successful outcome for the project will look like
- Drivers, meaning the candidate input variables thought to influence the outcome
- Assumptions and constraints
- Deliverables that the team has formally committed to hand over to the sponsor
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C - Assumptions and constraints
Domain 3: Data 21% of exam
Question 6
Which of the following is the BEST example of unstructured data?
- A relational table of customer IDs and their account balances
- A spreadsheet containing daily recorded temperature readings
- The free-text body of incoming customer support emails
- A relational database of product identifiers and prices
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C - The free-text body of incoming customer support emails
Question 7
In the "4 Vs" commonly used to characterize big data, the dimension that refers to the trustworthiness and quality of the data is:
- Volume
- Velocity
- Variety
- Veracity
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D - Veracity
Question 8
A profiling review finds that the same customer appears as three separate records because of slight spelling differences in the name field. Which data quality dimension is MOST directly violated?
- Timeliness
- Uniqueness
- Validity
- Accuracy
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B - Uniqueness
Question 9
An analyst records where each dataset originated, every transformation applied to it, and which version was used in the final model. The PRIMARY purpose of maintaining this data lineage is to:
- Reduce the ongoing storage cost of the organization's central data warehouse
- Increase the raw processing and scoring speed of the deployed model
- Enable traceability, reproducibility, and auditing of the results
- Automatically raise the predictive accuracy of the model that is built
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C - Enable traceability, reproducibility, and auditing of the results
Question 10
A column of adult patient ages contains mostly values between 20 and 90, plus several entries of 999. The value 999 was used by a legacy system to mean "unknown." The MOST appropriate action is to:
- Leave the values exactly as-is because they are part of the original source data
- Treat the 999 entries as missing values and handle them accordingly
- Delete every row that happens to contain any numeric age value at all
- Replace every age in the column with the average of 999 and the real ages
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B - Treat the 999 entries as missing values and handle them accordingly
The rest of the CAP-E blueprint
The CAP-E exam also covers these domains. Drill them in the full free practice test:
- Domain 4: Methodology (Approach) Framing 16% of exam
- Domain 5: Analytics/Model Development 16% of exam
- Domain 6: Deployment 8% of exam
- Domain 7: Analytics Solution Lifecycle Management 8% of exam