Case Study

Diagnosing a Self-Driving Car Pipeline

Case context: You are leading an ML team building a self-driving car. Through rigorous testing, you verify that your object detection, lane tracking, and path planning components all perform at human-level when evaluated individually. However, the overall self-driving car system plans significantly worse paths than a human given the same camera images.

Question: Based on Andrew Ng's framework, diagnose the fundamental problem with your self-driving car system and state the necessary decision your team must make.

Sample answer: The fundamental problem is that the ML pipeline itself is flawed. Because the system underperforms a human despite having human-level components, the overall architecture is insufficient. The team's necessary decision is to redesign the ML pipeline entirely.

Key points:

  • Diagnose the ML pipeline as flawed.
  • Decide to redesign the pipeline architecture.

Rubric: The answer must correctly conclude that the overall pipeline is flawed and state that the team needs to redesign it.

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Updated 2026-06-07

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