Question 320
Before accepting this AI feature, reviewers note: A support analytics pipeline uses an AI-assisted data cleaner that silently replaces all missing customer satisfaction ratings with the maximum score and then publishes improved averages. Which preventive practice should be standardized to avoid recurrence?
Explanation
Correct Answer
This safeguard addresses missing value imputation conceals data completeness problem: Require imputation policy review and track original versus transformed values when AI-assisted data cleaning changes analytical metrics. The prevented failure mechanism is: Automated imputation is a modeling choice that can bias results if missingness mechanisms and business meaning are not assessed and recorded. A control for an unrelated service cannot establish the required protection.
Incorrect Answers
Inconsistent date formats and locale assumptions can transform valid source values into incorrect time dimensions without producing obvious technical errors. “Include locale-specific date fixtures and temporal reconciliation in automated AI-assisted data preparation pipelines” would remedy that alternative situation, but it would not correct the present issue: automated imputation is a modeling choice that can bias results if missingness mechanisms and business meaning are not assessed and recorded.
“Maintain lineage and duplicate-rate checks when automating data ingestion and preparation with AI tools” is the supported response when joining or concatenating data without stable deduplication keys can count one response multiple times and distort inferred population trends. Here the decisive response is “Require imputation policy review and track original versus transformed values when AI-assisted data cleaning changes analytical metrics”, so that different intervention does not meet the stated requirement.
Exploratory data analysis must distinguish distributional patterns from outliers, and a mean alone can be misleading when values are strongly skewed. “Maintain independent numerical checks of AI-generated descriptive statistics, especially when data has high variance or long tails” applies to that other condition. The reported evidence is a support analytics pipeline uses an AI-assisted data cleaner that silently replaces all missing customer satisfaction ratings with the maximum score and then publishes improved averages; this alternative would address the wrong dependency.