Skip to main content

20 Must know Data Science Interview Questions by kdnuggets

The Most important questions which is generally asked by the technical panel :

1. Explain what regularization is and why it is useful.
2. Which data scientists do you admire most? which startups?
3. How would you validate a model you created to generate a predictive model of a quantitative outcome variable using multiple regression.
4. Explain what precision and recall are. How do they relate to the ROC curve?
5. How can you prove that one improvement you've brought to an algorithm is really an improvement over not doing anything?
6. What is root cause analysis?
7. Are you familiar with pricing optimization, price elasticity, inventory management, competitive intelligence? Give examples.
8. What is statistical power?
9. Explain what resampling methods are and why they are useful. Also explain their limitations.
10. Is it better to have too many false positives, or too many false negatives? Explain.
11. What is selection bias, why is it important and how can you avoid it?
12. Give an example of how you would use experimental design to answer a question about user behavior.
13. What is the difference between "long" and "wide" format data?
14. What method do you use to determine whether the statistics published in an article (e.g. newspaper) are either wrong or presented to support the author's point of view, rather than correct, comprehensive factual information on a specific subject?
15. Explain Edward Tufte's concept of "chart junk."
16. How would you screen for outliers and what should you do if you find one?
17. How would you use either the extreme value theory, Monte Carlo simulations or mathematical statistics (or anything else) to correctly estimate the chance of a very rare event?
18. What is a recommendation engine? How does it work?
19. Explain what a false positive and a false negative are. Why is it important to differentiate these from each other?
20. Which tools do you use for visualization? What do you think of Tableau? R? SAS? (for graphs). How to efficiently represent 5 dimension in a chart (or in a video)?

Answers from kdnuggets : https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/02/21-data-science-interview-questions-answers.html

Happy Learning...!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Random Forest Algorithm

Random Forest is an ensemble machine learning algorithm that follows the bagging technique. The base estimators in the random forest are decision trees. Random forest randomly selects a set of features that are used to decide the best split at each node of the decision tree. Looking at it step-by-step, this is what a random forest model does: 1. Random subsets are created from the original dataset (bootstrapping). 2. At each node in the decision tree, only a random set of features are considered to decide the best split. 3. A decision tree model is fitted on each of the subsets. 4. The final prediction is calculated by averaging the predictions from all decision trees. To sum up, the Random forest randomly selects data points and features and builds multiple trees (Forest). Random Forest is used for feature importance selection. The attribute (.feature_importances_) is used to find feature importance. Some Important Parameters:- 1. n_estimators: - It defines the number of decision tree...

How to deal with missing values in data cleaning

The data you inherit for analysis will come from multiple sources and would have been pulled adhoc. So this data will not be immediately ready for you to run any kind of model on. One of the most common issues you will have to deal with is missing values in the dataset. There are many reasons why values might be missing - intentional, user did not fill up, online forms broken, accidentally deleted, legacy issues etc.  Either way you will need to fix this problem. There are 3 ways to do this - either you will ignore the missing values, delete the missing value rows or fill the missing values with an approximation. Its easiest to just drop the missing observations but you need to very careful before you do that, because the absence of a value might actually be conveying some information about the data pattern. If you decide to drop missing values : df_no_missing = df.dropna() will drop any rows with any value missing. Even if some values are available in a row it will still get dropp...

Differentiate between univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis.

Univariate analysis are descriptive statistical analysis techniques which can be differentiated based on one variable involved at a given point of time. For example, the pie charts of sales based on territory involve only one variable and can the analysis can be referred to as univariate analysis. The bivariate analysis attempts to understand the difference between two variables at a time as in a scatterplot. For example, analyzing the volume of sale and spending can be considered as an example of bivariate analysis. Multivariate analysis deals with the study of more than two variables to understand the effect of variables on the responses.