What is the difference between Cluster and Systematic Sampling?
Cluster sampling is a technique used when it becomes difficult to study the target population spread across a wide area and simple random sampling cannot be applied. Cluster Sample is a probability sample where each sampling unit is a collection, or cluster of elements. Systematic sampling is a statistical technique where elements are selected from an ordered sampling frame. In systematic sampling, the list is progressed in a circular manner so once you reach the end of the list,it is progressed from the top again. The best example for systematic sampling is equal probability method.
Are expected value and mean value different?
They are not different but the terms are used in different contexts. Mean is generally referred when talking about a probability distribution or sample population whereas expected value is generally referred in a random variable context.
For Sampling Data
Mean value is the only value that comes from the sampling data.
Expected Value is the mean of all the means i.e. the value that is built from multiple samples. Expected value is the population mean.
For Distributions
Mean value and Expected value are same irrespective of the distribution, under the condition that the distribution is in the same population.
What does P-value signify about the statistical data?
P-value is used to determine the significance of results after a hypothesis test in statistics. P-value helps the readers to draw conclusions and is always between 0 and 1.
• P- Value > 0.05 denotes weak evidence against the null hypothesis which means the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.
• P-value <= 0.05 denotes strong evidence against the null hypothesis which means the null hypothesis can be rejected.
• P-value=0.05is the marginal value indicating it is possible to go either way.
If you dealt 13 cards, what is the probability that the 13th card is a King?
A) 1/52
B) 1/13
C) 1/26
D) 1/12
Ans: (B)
Since we are not told anything about the first 12 cards that are dealt, the probability that the 13th card dealt is a King, is the same as the probability that the first card dealt, or in fact any particular card dealt is a King, and this equals: 4/52
A fair six-sided die is rolled 6 times. What is the probability of getting all outcomes as unique?
A) 0.01543
B) 0.01993
C) 0.23148
D) 0.03333
Ans: (A)
For all the outcomes to be unique, we have 6 choices for the first turn, 5 for the second turn, 4 for the third turn and so on
Therefore the probability if getting all unique outcomes will be equal to 0.01543
You are given a data set consisting of variables having more than 30% missing values? Let’s say, out of 50 variables, 8 variables have missing values higher than 30%. How will you deal with them?
We can deal with them in the following ways:
Assign a unique category to missing values, who knows the missing values might decipher some trend
We can remove them blatantly.
Or, we can sensibly check their distribution with the target variable, and if found any pattern we’ll keep those missing values and assign them a new category while removing others.
‘People who bought this, also bought…’ recommendations seen on amazon is a result of which algorithm?
The basic idea for this kind of recommendation engine comes from collaborative filtering.
Collaborative Filtering algorithm considers “User Behavior” for recommending items. They exploit behavior of other users and items in terms of transaction history, ratings, selection and purchase information. Other users behaviour and preferences over the items are used to recommend items to the new users. In this case, features of the items are not known.
What do you understand by Type I vs Type II error ?
Type I error is committed when the null hypothesis is true and we reject it, also known as a ‘False Positive’. Type II error is committed when the null hypothesis is false and we accept it, also known as ‘False Negative’.
In the context of confusion matrix, we can say Type I error occurs when we classify a value as positive (1) when it is actually negative (0). Type II error occurs when we classify a value as negative (0) when it is actually positive(1).
You are working on a classification problem. For validation purposes, you’ve randomly sampled the training data set into train and validation. You are confident that your model will work incredibly well on unseen data since your validation accuracy is high. However, you get shocked after getting poor test accuracy. What went wrong?
In case of classification problem, we should always use stratified sampling instead of random sampling. A random sampling doesn’t takes into consideration the proportion of target classes. On the contrary, stratified sampling helps to maintain the distribution of target variable in the resultant distributed samples also.
You have been asked to evaluate a regression model based on R², adjusted R² and tolerance. What will be your criteria?
Tolerance (1 / VIF) is used as an indicator of multicollinearity. It is an indicator of percent of variance in a predictor which cannot be accounted by other predictors. Large values of tolerance is desirable.
We will consider adjusted R² as opposed to R² to evaluate model fit because R² increases irrespective of improvement in prediction accuracy as we add more variables. But, adjusted R² would only increase if an additional variable improves the accuracy of model, otherwise stays same. It is difficult to commit a general threshold value for adjusted R² because it varies between data sets. For example: a gene mutation data set might result in lower adjusted R² and still provide fairly good predictions, as compared to a stock market data where lower adjusted R² implies that model is not good.
In k-means or kNN, we use euclidean distance to calculate the distance between nearest neighbors. Why not manhattan distance ?
We don’t use manhattan distance because it calculates distance horizontally or vertically only. It has dimension restrictions. On the other hand, euclidean metric can be used in any space to calculate distance. Since, the data points can be present in any dimension, euclidean distance is a more viable option.
Example: Think of a chess board, the movement made by a bishop or a rook is calculated by manhattan distance because of their respective vertical & horizontal movements.
A group of 60 students is randomly split into 3 classes of equal size. All partitions are equally likely. Jack and Jill are two students belonging to that group. What is the probability that Jack and Jill will end up in the same class?
A) 1/3
B) 19/59
C) 18/58
D) 1/2
Ans: (B)
Assign a different number to each student from 1 to 60. Numbers 1 to 20 go in group 1, 21 to 40 go to group 2, 41 to 60 go to group 3.
All possible partitions are obtained with equal probability by a random assignment if these numbers, it doesn’t matter with which students we start, so we are free to start by assigning a random number to Jack and then we assign a random number to Jill. After Jack has been assigned a random number there are 59 random numbers available for Jill and 19 of these will put her in the same group as Jack. Therefore the probability is 19/59
We have two coins, A and B. For each toss of coin A, the probability of getting head is 1/2 and for each toss of coin B, the probability of getting Heads is 1/3. All tosses of the same coin are independent. We select a coin at random and toss it till we get a head. The probability of selecting coin A is ¼ and coin B is 3/4. What is the expected number of tosses to get the first heads?
A) 2.75
B) 3.35
C) 4.13
D) 5.33
Ans: (A)
If coin A is selected then the number of times the coin would be tossed for a guaranteed Heads is 2, similarly, for coin B it is 3. Thus the number of times would be
Tosses = 2 * (1/4)[probability of selecting coin A] + 3*(3/4)[probability of selecting coin B]
= 2.75
What are categorical variables?
A test has a true positive rate of 100% and false positive rate of 5%. There is a population with a 1/1000 rate of having the condition the test identifies. Considering a positive test, what is the probability of having that condition?
Let’s suppose you are being tested for a disease, if you have the illness the test will end up saying you have the illness. However, if you don’t have the illness- 5% of the times the test will end up saying you have the illness and 95% of the times the test will give accurate result that you don’t have the illness. Thus there is a 5% error in case you do not have the illness.
Out of 1000 people, 1 person who has the disease will get true positive result.
Out of the remaining 999 people, 5% will also get true positive result.
Close to 50 people will get a true positive result for the disease.
This means that out of 1000 people, 51 people will be tested positive for the disease even though only one person has the illness. There is only a 2% probability of you having the disease even if your reports say that you have the disease.
What is the difference between Supervised Learning an Unsupervised Learning?
If an algorithm learns something from the training data so that the knowledge can be applied to the test data, then it is referred to as Supervised Learning. Classification is an example for Supervised Learning. If the algorithm does not learn anything beforehand because there is no response variable or any training data, then it is referred to as unsupervised learning. Clustering is an example for unsupervised learning.
What is the goal of A/B Testing?
It is a statistical hypothesis testing for randomized experiment with two variables A and B. The goal of A/B Testing is to identify any changes to the web page to maximize or increase the outcome of an interest. An example for this could be identifying the click through rate for a banner ad.
What is an Eigenvalue and Eigenvector?
Eigenvectors are used for understanding linear transformations. In data analysis, we usually calculate the eigenvectors for a correlation or covariance matrix. Eigenvectors are the directions along which a particular linear transformation acts by flipping, compressing or stretching. Eigenvalue can be referred to as the strength of the transformation in the direction of eigenvector or the factor by which the compression occurs.
How can outlier values be treated?
Outlier values can be identified by using univariate or any other graphical analysis method. If the number of outlier values is few then they can be assessed individually but for large number of outliers the values can be substituted with either the 99th or the 1st percentile values. All extreme values are not outlier values.The most common ways to treat outlier values –
1) To change the value and bring in within a range
2) To just remove the value.
How can you assess a good logistic model?
There are various methods to assess the results of a logistic regression analysis-
• Using Classification Matrix to look at the true negatives and false positives.
• Concordance that helps identify the ability of the logistic model to differentiate between the event happening and not happening.
• Lift helps assess the logistic model by comparing it with random selection.
What are various steps involved in an analytics project?
• Understand the business problem
• Explore the data and become familiar with it.
• Prepare the data for modelling by detecting outliers, treating missing values, transforming variables, etc.
• After data preparation, start running the model, analyse the result and tweak the approach. This is an iterative step till the best possible outcome is achieved.
• Validate the model using a new data set.
• Start implementing the model and track the result to analyse the performance of the model over the period of time.
How can you iterate over a list and also retrieve element indices at the same time?
This can be done using the enumerate function which takes every element in a sequence just like in a list and adds its location just before it.
A roulette wheel has 38 slots, 18 are red, 18 are black, and 2 are green. You play five games and always bet on red. What is the probability that you win all the 5 games?
A) 0.0368
B) 0.0238
C) 0.0526
D) 0.0473
Ans: (B)
The probability that it would be Red in any spin is 18/38. Now, you are playing for game 5 times and all the games are independent of each other. Thus, the probability that you win all the games is (18/38)5 = 0.0238.
Cluster sampling is a technique used when it becomes difficult to study the target population spread across a wide area and simple random sampling cannot be applied. Cluster Sample is a probability sample where each sampling unit is a collection, or cluster of elements. Systematic sampling is a statistical technique where elements are selected from an ordered sampling frame. In systematic sampling, the list is progressed in a circular manner so once you reach the end of the list,it is progressed from the top again. The best example for systematic sampling is equal probability method.
Are expected value and mean value different?
They are not different but the terms are used in different contexts. Mean is generally referred when talking about a probability distribution or sample population whereas expected value is generally referred in a random variable context.
For Sampling Data
Mean value is the only value that comes from the sampling data.
Expected Value is the mean of all the means i.e. the value that is built from multiple samples. Expected value is the population mean.
For Distributions
Mean value and Expected value are same irrespective of the distribution, under the condition that the distribution is in the same population.
What does P-value signify about the statistical data?
P-value is used to determine the significance of results after a hypothesis test in statistics. P-value helps the readers to draw conclusions and is always between 0 and 1.
• P- Value > 0.05 denotes weak evidence against the null hypothesis which means the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.
• P-value <= 0.05 denotes strong evidence against the null hypothesis which means the null hypothesis can be rejected.
• P-value=0.05is the marginal value indicating it is possible to go either way.
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| NetSuite Most Frequently Asked Data Science Interview Questions Answers |
If you dealt 13 cards, what is the probability that the 13th card is a King?
A) 1/52
B) 1/13
C) 1/26
D) 1/12
Ans: (B)
Since we are not told anything about the first 12 cards that are dealt, the probability that the 13th card dealt is a King, is the same as the probability that the first card dealt, or in fact any particular card dealt is a King, and this equals: 4/52
A fair six-sided die is rolled 6 times. What is the probability of getting all outcomes as unique?
A) 0.01543
B) 0.01993
C) 0.23148
D) 0.03333
Ans: (A)
For all the outcomes to be unique, we have 6 choices for the first turn, 5 for the second turn, 4 for the third turn and so on
Therefore the probability if getting all unique outcomes will be equal to 0.01543
You are given a data set consisting of variables having more than 30% missing values? Let’s say, out of 50 variables, 8 variables have missing values higher than 30%. How will you deal with them?
We can deal with them in the following ways:
Assign a unique category to missing values, who knows the missing values might decipher some trend
We can remove them blatantly.
Or, we can sensibly check their distribution with the target variable, and if found any pattern we’ll keep those missing values and assign them a new category while removing others.
‘People who bought this, also bought…’ recommendations seen on amazon is a result of which algorithm?
The basic idea for this kind of recommendation engine comes from collaborative filtering.
Collaborative Filtering algorithm considers “User Behavior” for recommending items. They exploit behavior of other users and items in terms of transaction history, ratings, selection and purchase information. Other users behaviour and preferences over the items are used to recommend items to the new users. In this case, features of the items are not known.
What do you understand by Type I vs Type II error ?
Type I error is committed when the null hypothesis is true and we reject it, also known as a ‘False Positive’. Type II error is committed when the null hypothesis is false and we accept it, also known as ‘False Negative’.
In the context of confusion matrix, we can say Type I error occurs when we classify a value as positive (1) when it is actually negative (0). Type II error occurs when we classify a value as negative (0) when it is actually positive(1).
You are working on a classification problem. For validation purposes, you’ve randomly sampled the training data set into train and validation. You are confident that your model will work incredibly well on unseen data since your validation accuracy is high. However, you get shocked after getting poor test accuracy. What went wrong?
In case of classification problem, we should always use stratified sampling instead of random sampling. A random sampling doesn’t takes into consideration the proportion of target classes. On the contrary, stratified sampling helps to maintain the distribution of target variable in the resultant distributed samples also.
You have been asked to evaluate a regression model based on R², adjusted R² and tolerance. What will be your criteria?
Tolerance (1 / VIF) is used as an indicator of multicollinearity. It is an indicator of percent of variance in a predictor which cannot be accounted by other predictors. Large values of tolerance is desirable.
We will consider adjusted R² as opposed to R² to evaluate model fit because R² increases irrespective of improvement in prediction accuracy as we add more variables. But, adjusted R² would only increase if an additional variable improves the accuracy of model, otherwise stays same. It is difficult to commit a general threshold value for adjusted R² because it varies between data sets. For example: a gene mutation data set might result in lower adjusted R² and still provide fairly good predictions, as compared to a stock market data where lower adjusted R² implies that model is not good.
In k-means or kNN, we use euclidean distance to calculate the distance between nearest neighbors. Why not manhattan distance ?
We don’t use manhattan distance because it calculates distance horizontally or vertically only. It has dimension restrictions. On the other hand, euclidean metric can be used in any space to calculate distance. Since, the data points can be present in any dimension, euclidean distance is a more viable option.
Example: Think of a chess board, the movement made by a bishop or a rook is calculated by manhattan distance because of their respective vertical & horizontal movements.
A group of 60 students is randomly split into 3 classes of equal size. All partitions are equally likely. Jack and Jill are two students belonging to that group. What is the probability that Jack and Jill will end up in the same class?
A) 1/3
B) 19/59
C) 18/58
D) 1/2
Ans: (B)
Assign a different number to each student from 1 to 60. Numbers 1 to 20 go in group 1, 21 to 40 go to group 2, 41 to 60 go to group 3.
All possible partitions are obtained with equal probability by a random assignment if these numbers, it doesn’t matter with which students we start, so we are free to start by assigning a random number to Jack and then we assign a random number to Jill. After Jack has been assigned a random number there are 59 random numbers available for Jill and 19 of these will put her in the same group as Jack. Therefore the probability is 19/59
We have two coins, A and B. For each toss of coin A, the probability of getting head is 1/2 and for each toss of coin B, the probability of getting Heads is 1/3. All tosses of the same coin are independent. We select a coin at random and toss it till we get a head. The probability of selecting coin A is ¼ and coin B is 3/4. What is the expected number of tosses to get the first heads?
A) 2.75
B) 3.35
C) 4.13
D) 5.33
Ans: (A)
If coin A is selected then the number of times the coin would be tossed for a guaranteed Heads is 2, similarly, for coin B it is 3. Thus the number of times would be
Tosses = 2 * (1/4)[probability of selecting coin A] + 3*(3/4)[probability of selecting coin B]
= 2.75
What are categorical variables?
A test has a true positive rate of 100% and false positive rate of 5%. There is a population with a 1/1000 rate of having the condition the test identifies. Considering a positive test, what is the probability of having that condition?
Let’s suppose you are being tested for a disease, if you have the illness the test will end up saying you have the illness. However, if you don’t have the illness- 5% of the times the test will end up saying you have the illness and 95% of the times the test will give accurate result that you don’t have the illness. Thus there is a 5% error in case you do not have the illness.
Out of 1000 people, 1 person who has the disease will get true positive result.
Out of the remaining 999 people, 5% will also get true positive result.
Close to 50 people will get a true positive result for the disease.
This means that out of 1000 people, 51 people will be tested positive for the disease even though only one person has the illness. There is only a 2% probability of you having the disease even if your reports say that you have the disease.
What is the difference between Supervised Learning an Unsupervised Learning?
If an algorithm learns something from the training data so that the knowledge can be applied to the test data, then it is referred to as Supervised Learning. Classification is an example for Supervised Learning. If the algorithm does not learn anything beforehand because there is no response variable or any training data, then it is referred to as unsupervised learning. Clustering is an example for unsupervised learning.
What is the goal of A/B Testing?
It is a statistical hypothesis testing for randomized experiment with two variables A and B. The goal of A/B Testing is to identify any changes to the web page to maximize or increase the outcome of an interest. An example for this could be identifying the click through rate for a banner ad.
What is an Eigenvalue and Eigenvector?
Eigenvectors are used for understanding linear transformations. In data analysis, we usually calculate the eigenvectors for a correlation or covariance matrix. Eigenvectors are the directions along which a particular linear transformation acts by flipping, compressing or stretching. Eigenvalue can be referred to as the strength of the transformation in the direction of eigenvector or the factor by which the compression occurs.
How can outlier values be treated?
Outlier values can be identified by using univariate or any other graphical analysis method. If the number of outlier values is few then they can be assessed individually but for large number of outliers the values can be substituted with either the 99th or the 1st percentile values. All extreme values are not outlier values.The most common ways to treat outlier values –
1) To change the value and bring in within a range
2) To just remove the value.
How can you assess a good logistic model?
There are various methods to assess the results of a logistic regression analysis-
• Using Classification Matrix to look at the true negatives and false positives.
• Concordance that helps identify the ability of the logistic model to differentiate between the event happening and not happening.
• Lift helps assess the logistic model by comparing it with random selection.
What are various steps involved in an analytics project?
• Understand the business problem
• Explore the data and become familiar with it.
• Prepare the data for modelling by detecting outliers, treating missing values, transforming variables, etc.
• After data preparation, start running the model, analyse the result and tweak the approach. This is an iterative step till the best possible outcome is achieved.
• Validate the model using a new data set.
• Start implementing the model and track the result to analyse the performance of the model over the period of time.
How can you iterate over a list and also retrieve element indices at the same time?
This can be done using the enumerate function which takes every element in a sequence just like in a list and adds its location just before it.
A roulette wheel has 38 slots, 18 are red, 18 are black, and 2 are green. You play five games and always bet on red. What is the probability that you win all the 5 games?
A) 0.0368
B) 0.0238
C) 0.0526
D) 0.0473
Ans: (B)
The probability that it would be Red in any spin is 18/38. Now, you are playing for game 5 times and all the games are independent of each other. Thus, the probability that you win all the games is (18/38)5 = 0.0238.
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