Top 100 Common Data Scientist Interview

Questions and Answers

Common Data Science Interview Questions

1. What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning comprises two words-machine and learning, which hint towards
its definition - a subdomain in computer science that deals with the application of
mathematical algorithms to identify the trend or pattern in a dataset.

The simplest example is the usage of linear regression (y=mt+c) to predict the
output of a variable y as a function of time. The machine learning model learns the
trends in the dataset by fitting the equation on the dataset and evaluating the best
set of values for m and c. One can then use these equations to predict future
values.

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2. Quickly differentiate between Machine Learning, Data Science,

and AI.

Machine Learning Data Science Artificial Intelligence

Data Science refers to

A branch of Artificial A term that broadly
the art of using machine
Intelligence that deals covers the
learning and deep
Basic with the usage of simple applications of
learning techniques
Meaning statistics-inspired computer science
over large data to
algorithms to identify spanning Robotics,
predict certain
patterns in the dataset. Text Analysis, etc.
outcomes.

3. Out of Python and R, which is your preference for performing text

analysis?

Python is likely to be everyone’s choice for text analysis as it has libraries like
Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), Gensim. CoreNLP, SpaCy, TextBlob, etc. are
useful for text analysis.
4. What are Recommender Systems?

Understanding consumer behavior is often the primary goal of many businesses.

For example, consider the case of Amazon. If a user searches for a product
category on its website, the major challenge for Amazon’s backend algorithms is to
come up with suggestions that are likely to motivate the users to make a purchase.
And such algorithms are the heart of recommendation systems or recommender
systems. These systems aim at analyzing customer behavior and evaluating their
fondness for different products. Apart from Amazon, recommender systems are
also used by Netflix, Youtube, Flipkart, etc.

5. Why data cleaning plays a vital role in the analysis?

(Access popular Python and R Codes for data cleaning )It is cumbersome to clean
data from multiple sources to transform it into a format that data analysts or
scientists can work with. As the number of data sources increases, the time it takes
to clean the data increases exponentially due to the number of sources and the
volume of data generated in these sources. It might take up to 80% of the time for
cleaning data, thus making it a critical part of the analysis task.

6. Define Collaborative filtering.

The process of filtering is used by most recommender systems to identify patterns

or information by collaborating viewpoints, various data sources, and multiple
agents.

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7. What is an Eigenvalue and Eigenvector?

Eigenvectors are used for understanding linear transformations. They are the
directions along which a particular linear transformation acts by flipping,
compressing, or stretching. Eigenvalues can be referred to as the strength of the
transformation in the direction of the eigenvector or the factor by which the
compression occurs. We usually calculate the eigenvectors for a correlation or
covariance matrix in data analysis.

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8. What is Gradient Descent?

Gradient descent is an iterative procedure that minimizes the cost function

parametrized by model parameters. It is an optimization method based on convex
function and trims the parameters iteratively to help the given function attain its
local minimum. Gradient measures the change in parameter with respect to the
change in error. Imagine a blindfolded person on top of a hill and wanting to reach
the lower altitude. The simple technique he can use is to feel the ground in every
direction and take a step in the direction where the ground is descending faster.
Here we need the help of the learning rate which says the size of the step we take
to reach the minimum. The learning rate should be chosen so that it should not be
too high or too low. When the selected learning rate is too high, it tends to bounce
back and forth between the convex function of the gradient descent, and when it is
too low, we will reach the minimum very slowly.

9. Differentiate between a multi-label classification problem and a

multi-class classification problem.

Multi-label Classification Multi-Class Classification

A classification problem where each target
A classification problem where each
variable in the dataset can be assigned only
target variable in the dataset can be
one class out of two or more than two
labeled with more than one class.
classes.

For Example, a news article can be

For Example, the task of classifying fruits
labeled with more than two topics,
images where each image contains only
say, sports and fashion.
one fruit.

10. What are the various steps involved in an analytics project?

 Understand the business problem and convert it into a data analytics

problem.
 Use exploratory data analysis techniques to understand the given dataset.
 With the help of feature selection and feature engineering methods, prepare
the training and testing dataset.
 Explore machine learning/deep learning algorithms and use one to build a
training model.
  Feed training dataset to the model and improve the model’s performance by
analyzing various statistical parameters.
 Test the performance of the model using the testing dataset.
 Deploy the model, if needed, and monitor the model performance.

11. What is the difference between feature selection and feature

engineering methods?

Feature Selection Feature Engineering

Feature Engineering methods are the
Feature selection methods are the
methods that are used to create new
methods that are used to obtain a subset
features from the given dataset using the
of variables from the dataset that are
existing variables. These methods allow
required to build a model that best fits
to better fit complicated trends in the
the trends in the dataset.
dataset.
Example: Intrinsic Methods(Rule and
tree-based algorithms, MARS Models,
Example: Imputation, Discreteziation,
etc.), Filter Methods, Wrapper
Categorical Encoding, etc.
Methods(Recursive Feature Elimination,
Genetic Algorithms, etc.)

12. What do you know about MLOps tools? Have you ever used
them in a machine learning project?

MLOps tools are the tools that are used to produce and monitor the enterprise-
grade deployment of machine learning models. Examples of such tools are MLflow,
Pachyderm, Kubeflow, etc.

In case you haven’t worked on an MLOps project, try this MLOps project by Goku
Mohandas on Github or this MLOps Project on GCP using Kubeflow for Model
Deployment by ProjectPro.