Job brief

We are looking for a passionate certified Data Analyst. The successful candidate will turn data into
information, information into insight and insight into business decisions.

Data Analyst Job Duties

Data analyst responsibilities include conducting full lifecycle analysis to include requirements, activities
and design. Data analysts will develop analysis and reporting capabilities. They will also monitor
performance and quality control plans to identify improvements.

Responsibilities

Interpret data, analyze results using statistical techniques and provide ongoing reports

Develop and implement databases, data collection systems, data analytics and other strategies
that optimize statistical efficiency and quality

Acquire data from primary or secondary data sources and maintain databases/data systems

Identify, analyze, and interpret trends or patterns in complex data sets

Filter and clean data by reviewing computer reports, printouts, and performance indicators to
locate and correct code problems

Work with management to prioritize business and information needs

Locate and define new process improvement opportunities

Requirements

Proven working experience as a data analyst or business data analyst

Technical expertise regarding data models, database design development, data mining and
segmentation techniques

Strong knowledge of and experience with reporting packages (Business Objects etc), databases
(SQL etc), programming (XML, Javascript, or ETL frameworks)

Knowledge of statistics and experience using statistical packages for analyzing datasets (Excel,
SPSS, SAS etc)

Strong analytical skills with the ability to collect, organize, analyze, and disseminate significant
amounts of information with attention to detail and accuracy

Adept at queries, report writing and presenting findings

BS in Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science, Information Management or Statistics

 Data Scientist (Analyst) interview
questions
This Data Scientist (Analyst) interview profile
offers a sample of suitable interview questions
for data analysts. Feel free to modify
these interview questions for candidates to fit
the specific requirements and needs of your
data science team.

Jump to section:

Introduction

Operational questions

Role-specific questions
Data Scientist Analysis Interview
Questions
Successful data scientists, managers and analysts excel at
deriving actionable insights from the data that an organization
generates. They have a good sense of what data they need to
collect and have a solid process for carrying out effective data
analyses and building predictive models.

The data scientist role that is focused on data

analysis requires candidates with a very strong foundation in
topics such as statistics, operations research and machine
learning as well database skills such as SQL in order to
retrieve, clean and process data from a variety of sources.
Several pathways can lead to this role so candidates could
approach the data analysis interview questions from a
mathematics or statistics background although many will
come from computer science or engineering.

This type of data scientist will often program in a scripting

language such as R, Python or MATLAB and the role will
typically not place emphasis on the programming languages,
practices and general software engineering skills necessary
for working with production quality software. There may be a
need to modify some questions to more quantitative,
statistical analysis interview questions. This type of role often
incorporates the need to present the findings of an analysis.
Consequently, information visualization skills, such as
knowledge of Tableau or D3.js, as well as being a good
communicator can be highly valuable.

Operational questions
Data Analytics Interview Questions
 Describe the steps you follow when designing a data-
driven model to tackle a business problem. An example might
be to automatically classify customer support emails by topic
or sentiment. Another might be to predict a companys
employee churn.

Describe different pre-processing steps that you might

carry out on data before using them to train a model and state
under what conditions they might be applied.

What models would you characterize as simple models

and which ones as complex? What are the relative strengths
and weaknesses of choosing a more complex model over a
simpler one?

In what ways can models be combined to form model

ensembles and what are some advantages of doing this?

What is dimensionality reduction? What are some ways to

perform this? When and why might we want to do this?

Role-specific questions
(Basic ideas in statistics, probability and machine learning)

What is a confidence interval and why is it useful?

What is the difference between statistical independence

and correlation?

What is conditional probability? What is Bayes Theorem?

Why is it useful in practice?

Suppose we are training a model using a particular

optimization procedure such as stochastic gradient descent.
How do we know if we are converging to a solution? If a
 training procedure converges will it always result in the best
possible solution?

How do we know if we have collected enough data to train

a model?

Explain why we have training, test and validation data

sets and how they are used effectively?

What is clustering? Give an example algorithm that

performs clustering. How can we know whether we obtained
decent clusters? How might we estimate a good number of
clusters to use with our data?

We often say that correlation does not imply causation.

What does this mean?

What is the difference between unsupervised and

supervised learning?

What is the difference between regression and

classification?

What do we mean when we talk about the bias-variance

tradeoff in statistical models?

What is over-fitting? How is this related to the bias-

variance trade-off? What is regularization? Give some
examples of regularization in models.

Suppose we want to train a binary classifier and one class

is very rare. Give an example of such a problem. How should
we train this model? What metrics should we use to measure
performance?

How many unique subsets of n different objects can we

make?
 How would you build a data-driven recommender system?
What are the limitations of this approach?

(Tools, visualization and presentation)

In which environment(s) do you usually run your analyses?

Describe your experience in working with data from

databases. Are you familiar with SQL?

What visualization tools (Tableau, D3.js, R and so on) have

you used?

Do you have a presentation you can show us, such as on

SlideShare?

Do you have experience presenting reports and findings

directly to senior management in your previous roles?

Are you confortable speaking in public? Have you ever

presented a technical topic to a large audience?

For more data science questions that emphasize programming

skills and deploying models in the real world, check out the
interview questions for the data scientist (coding) role.

https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/

JOB SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS

Analytical Skills: Data analysts work with large amounts of data: facts, figures, and number
crunching. You will need to see through the data and analyze it to find conclusions.
Communication Skills: Data analysts are often called to present their findings, or translate the
data into an understandable document. You will need to write and speak clearly, easily
communicating complex ideas.
Critical Thinking: Data analysts must look at the numbers, trends, and data and come to new
conclusions based on the findings.
 Attention to Detail: Data is precise. Data analysts have to make sure they are vigilant in their
analysis to come to correct conclusions.
Math Skills: Data analysts need math skills to estimate numerical data

Top 30 Data Analyst Interview Questions &

Answers
1) Mention what is the responsibility of a Data analyst?

Responsibility of a Data analyst include,

Provide support to all data analysis and coordinate with customers and staffs
Resolve business associated issues for clients and performing audit on data
Analyze results and interpret data using statistical techniques and provide
ongoing reports
Prioritize business needs and work closely with management and information
needs
Identify new process or areas for improvement opportunities
Analyze, identify and interpret trends or patterns in complex data sets
Acquire data from primary or secondary data sources and maintain
databases/data systems
Filter and clean data, and review computer reports
Determine performance indicators to locate and correct code problems
Securing database by developing access system by determining user level of
access
2) What is required to become a data analyst?

To become a data analyst,

Robust knowledge on reporting packages (Business Objects), programming
language (XML, Javascript, or ETL frameworks), databases (SQL, SQLite, etc.)
Strong skills with the ability to analyze, organize, collect and disseminate big
data with accuracy
Technical knowledge in database design, data models, data mining and
segmentation techniques
Strong knowledge on statistical packages for analyzing large datasets
(SAS, Excel, SPSS, etc.)
3) Mention what are the various steps in an analytics project?

Various steps in an analytics project include

Problem definition
Data exploration
Data preparation
Modelling
Validation of data
Implementation and tracking
4) Mention what is data cleansing?
Data cleaning also referred as data cleansing, deals with identifying and
removing errors and inconsistencies from data in order to enhance the
quality of data.

5) List out some of the best practices for data cleaning?

Some of the best practices for data cleaning includes,

Sort data by different attributes
For large datasets cleanse it stepwise and improve the data with each step
until you achieve a good data quality
For large datasets, break them into small data. Working with less data will
increase your iteration speed
To handle common cleansing task create a set of utility
functions/tools/scripts. It might include, remapping values based on a CSV file or
SQL database or, regex search-and-replace, blanking out all values that dont
match a regex
If you have an issue with data cleanliness, arrange them by estimated
frequency and attack the most common problems
Analyze the summary statistics for each column ( standard deviation, mean,
number of missing values,)
Keep track of every date cleaning operation, so you can alter changes or
remove operations if required

6) Explain what is logistic regression?

Logistic regression is a statistical method for examining a dataset in which

there are one or more independent variables that defines an outcome.

7) List of some best tools that can be useful for data-analysis?

Tableau
 RapidMiner
OpenRefine
KNIME
Google Search Operators
Solver
NodeXL
io
Wolfram Alphas
Google Fusion tables
8) Mention what is the difference between data mining and data
profiling?

The difference between data mining and data profiling is that

Data profiling: It targets on the instance analysis of individual attributes. It

gives information on various attributes like value range, discrete value and
their frequency, occurrence of null values, data type, length, etc.
Data mining: It focuses on cluster analysis, detection of unusual records,
dependencies, sequence discovery, relation holding between several
attributes, etc.
9) List out some common problems faced by data analyst?

Some of the common problems faced by data analyst are

Common misspelling
Duplicate entries
Missing values
Illegal values
Varying value representations
Identifying overlapping data
10) Mention the name of the framework developed by Apache for
processing large data set for an application in a distributed
computing environment?

Hadoop and MapReduce is the programming framework developed by

Apache for processing large data set for an application in a distributed
computing environment.

11) Mention what are the missing patterns that are generally
observed?

The missing patterns that are generally observed are

Missing completely at random
Missing at random
Missing that depends on the missing value itself
Missing that depends on unobserved input variable
12) Explain what is KNN imputation method?

In KNN imputation, the missing attribute values are imputed by using the
attributes value that are most similar to the attribute whose values are
missing. By using a distance function, the similarity of two attributes is
determined.

13) Mention what are the data validation methods used by data
analyst?

Usually, methods used by data analyst for data validation are

Data screening
Data verification
14) Explain what should be done with suspected or missing data?
Prepare a validation report that gives information of all suspected data. It
should give information like validation criteria that it failed and the date and time
of occurrence
Experience personnel should examine the suspicious data to determine their
acceptability
Invalid data should be assigned and replaced with a validation code
To work on missing data use the best analysis strategy like deletion method,
single imputation methods, model based methods, etc.
15) Mention how to deal the multi-source problems?

To deal the multi-source problems,

Restructuring of schemas to accomplish a schema integration
Identify similar records and merge them into single record containing all
relevant attributes without redundancy
16) Explain what is an Outlier?

The outlier is a commonly used terms by analysts referred for a value that
appears far away and diverges from an overall pattern in a sample. There are
two types of Outliers
Univariate
Multivariate
17) Explain what is Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm?

Hierarchical clustering algorithm combines and divides existing groups,

creating a hierarchical structure that showcase the order in which groups are
divided or merged.

18) Explain what is K-mean Algorithm?

K mean is a famous partitioning method. Objects are classified as belonging

to one of K groups, k chosen a priori.

In K-mean algorithm,
 The clusters are spherical: the data points in a cluster are centered around
that cluster
The variance/spread of the clusters is similar: Each data point belongs to the
closest cluster
19) Mention what are the key skills required for Data Analyst?

A data scientist must have the following skills

Database knowledge
Database management
Data blending
Querying
Data manipulation
Predictive Analytics
Basic descriptive statistics
Predictive modeling
Advanced analytics
Big Data Knowledge
Big data analytics
Unstructured data analysis
Machine learning
Presentation skill
Data visualization
Insight presentation
Report design
20) Explain what is collaborative filtering?
Collaborative filtering is a simple algorithm to create a recommendation
system based on user behavioral data. The most important components of
collaborative filtering are users- items- interest.

A good example of collaborative filtering is when you see a statement like

recommended for you on online shopping sites thats pops out based on
your browsing history.

21) Explain what are the tools used in Big Data?

Tools used in Big Data includes

Hadoop
Hive
Pig
Flume
Mahout
Sqoop
22) Explain what is KPI, design of experiments and 80/20 rule?
KPI: It stands for Key Performance Indicator, it is a metric that consists of
any combination of spreadsheets, reports or charts about business process
Design of experiments: It is the initial process used to split your data,
sample and set up of a data for statistical analysis
80/20 rules: It means that 80 percent of your income comes from 20
percent of your clients
23) Explain what is Map Reduce?

Map-reduce is a framework to process large data sets, splitting them into

subsets, processing each subset on a different server and then blending
results obtained on each.

24) Explain what is Clustering? What are the properties for

clustering algorithms?

Clustering is a classification method that is applied to data. Clustering

algorithm divides a data set into natural groups or clusters.

Properties for clustering algorithm are

Hierarchical or flat
Iterative
Hard and soft
Disjunctive
25) What are some of the statistical methods that are useful for
data-analyst?

Statistical methods that are useful for data scientist are

Bayesian method
Markov process
Spatial and cluster processes
Rank statistics, percentile, outliers detection
Imputation techniques, etc.
Simplex algorithm
Mathematical optimization
26) What is time series analysis?

Time series analysis can be done in two domains, frequency domain and the
time domain. In Time series analysis the output of a particular process can
be forecast by analyzing the previous data by the help of various methods
like exponential smoothening, log-linear regression method, etc.

27) Explain what is correlogram analysis?

A correlogram analysis is the common form of spatial analysis in geography.

It consists of a series of estimated autocorrelation coefficients calculated for
a different spatial relationship. It can be used to construct a correlogram for
distance-based data, when the raw data is expressed as distance rather than
values at individual points.

28) What is a hash table?

In computing, a hash table is a map of keys to values. It is a data structure
used to implement an associative array. It uses a hash function to compute
an index into an array of slots, from which desired value can be fetched.

29) What are hash table collisions? How is it avoided?

A hash table collision happens when two different keys hash to the same
value. Two data cannot be stored in the same slot in array.

To avoid hash table collision there are many techniques, here we list out two
Separate Chaining:

It uses the data structure to store multiple items that hash to the same slot.
Open addressing:

It searches for other slots using a second function and store item in first
empty slot that is found

29) Explain what is imputation? List out different types of

imputation techniques?

During imputation we replace missing data with substituted values. The

types of imputation techniques involve are
Single Imputation
Hot-deck imputation: A missing value is imputed from a randomly selected
similar record by the help of punch card
Cold deck imputation: It works same as hot deck imputation, but it is more
advanced and selects donors from another datasets
Mean imputation: It involves replacing missing value with the mean of that
variable for all other cases
Regression imputation: It involves replacing missing value with the predicted
values of a variable based on other variables
Stochastic regression: It is same as regression imputation, but it adds the
average regression variance to regression imputation
Multiple Imputation
Unlike single imputation, multiple imputation estimates the values multiple
times
30) Which imputation method is more favorable?

Although single imputation is widely used, it does not reflect the uncertainty
created by missing data at random. So, multiple imputation is more
favorable then single imputation in case of data missing at random.

31) Explain what is n-gram?

N-gram:
An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text
or speech. It is a type of probabilistic language model for predicting the next
item in such a sequence in the form of a (n-1).

32) Explain what is the criteria for a good data model?

Criteria for a good data model includes

It can be easily consumed
Large data changes in a good model should be scalable
It should provide predictable performance
A good model can adapt to changes in requirements

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