Softtek Most Frequently Asked Data Science Interview Questions Answers
What are Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues?
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.
Can you cite some examples where a false positive is important than a false negative?
Let us first understand what false positives and false negatives are. False positives are the cases where you wrongly classified a non-event as an event a.k.a Type I error. False negatives are the cases where you wrongly classify events as non-events, a.k.a Type II error.
Example 1: In the medical field, assume you have to give chemotherapy to patients. Assume a patient comes to that hospital and he is tested positive for cancer, based on the lab prediction but he actually doesn’t have cancer. This is a case of false positive. Here it is of utmost danger to start chemotherapy on this patient when he actually does not have cancer. In the absence of cancerous cell, chemotherapy will do certain damage to his normal healthy cells and might lead to severe diseases, even cancer.
Example 2: Let’s say an e-commerce company decided to give $1000 Gift voucher to the customers whom they assume to purchase at least $10,000 worth of items. They send free voucher mail directly to 100 customers without any minimum purchase condition because they assume to make at least 20% profit on sold items above $10,000. Now the issue is if we send the $1000 gift vouchers to customers who have not actually purchased anything but are marked as having made $10,000 worth of purchase.
During analysis, how do you treat missing values?
The extent of the missing values is identified after identifying the variables with missing values. If any patterns are identified the analyst has to concentrate on them as it could lead to interesting and meaningful business insights.
If there are no patterns identified, then the missing values can be substituted with mean or median values (imputation) or they can simply be ignored. Assigning a default value which can be mean, minimum or maximum value. Getting into the data is important.
If it is a categorical variable, the default value is assigned. The missing value is assigned a default value. If you have a distribution of data coming, for normal distribution give the mean value.
If 80% of the values for a variable are missing then you can answer that you would be dropping the variable instead of treating the missing values.
In any 15-minute interval, there is a 20% probability that you will see at least one shooting star. What is the probability that you see at least one shooting star in the period of an hour?
Probability of not seeing any shooting star in 15 minutes is
= 1 – P( Seeing one shooting star )
= 1 – 0.2 = 0.8
Probability of not seeing any shooting star in the period of one hour
= (0.8) ^ 4 = 0.4096
Probability of seeing at least one shooting star in the one hour
= 1 – P( Not seeing any star )
= 1 – 0.4096 = 0.5904
How can you generate a random number between 1 – 7 with only a die?
Any die has six sides from 1-6. There is no way to get seven equal outcomes from a single rolling of a die. If we roll the die twice and consider the event of two rolls, we now have 36 different outcomes.
To get our 7 equal outcomes we have to reduce this 36 to a number divisible by 7. We can thus consider only 35 outcomes and exclude the other one.
A simple scenario can be to exclude the combination (6,6), i.e., to roll the die again if 6 appears twice.
All the remaining combinations from (1,1) till (6,5) can be divided into 7 parts of 5 each. This way all the seven sets of outcomes are equally likely.
A certain couple tells you that they have two children, at least one of which is a girl. What is the probability that they have two girls?
In the case of two children, there are 4 equally likely possibilities
BB, BG, GB and GG;
where B = Boy and G = Girl and the first letter denotes the first child.
From the question, we can exclude the first case of BB. Thus from the remaining 3 possibilities of BG, GB & BB, we have to find the probability of the case with two girls.
Thus, P(Having two girls given one girl) = 1 / 3
What is the advantage of performing dimensionality reduction before fitting an SVM?
Support Vector Machine Learning Algorithm performs better in the reduced space. It is beneficial to perform dimensionality reduction before fitting an SVM if the number of features is large when compared to the number of observations.
How do data management procedures like missing data handling make selection bias worse?
Missing value treatment is one of the primary tasks which a data scientist is supposed to do before starting data analysis. There are multiple methods for missing value treatment. If not done properly, it could potentially result into selection bias. Let see few missing value treatment examples and their impact on selection-
Complete Case Treatment: Complete case treatment is when you remove entire row in data even if one value is missing. You could achieve a selection bias if your values are not missing at random and they have some pattern. Assume you are conducting a survey and few people didn’t specify their gender. Would you remove all those people? Can’t it tell a different story?
Available case analysis: Let say you are trying to calculate correlation matrix for data so you might remove the missing values from variables which are needed for that particular correlation coefficient. In this case your values will not be fully correct as they are coming from population sets.
Mean Substitution: In this method missing values are replaced with mean of other available values.This might make your distribution biased e.g., standard deviation, correlation and regression are mostly dependent on the mean value of variables.
Hence, various data management procedures might include selection bias in your data if not chosen correctly.
Can you cite some examples where a false negative important than a false positive?
Assume there is an airport ‘A’ which has received high security threats and based on certain characteristics they identify whether a particular passenger can be a threat or not. Due to shortage of staff they decided to scan passenger being predicted as risk positives by their predictive model.
What will happen if a true threat customer is being flagged as non-threat by airport model?
Another example can be judicial system. What if Jury or judge decide to make a criminal go free?
What if you rejected to marry a very good person based on your predictive model and you happen to meet him/her after few years and realize that you had a false negative?
Can you cite some examples where both false positive and false negatives are equally important?
In the banking industry giving loans is the primary source of making money but at the same time if your repayment rate is not good you will not make any profit, rather you will risk huge losses.
Banks don’t want to lose good customers and at the same point of time they don’t want to acquire bad customers. In this scenario both the false positives and false negatives become very important to measure.
These days we hear many cases of players using steroids during sport competitions Every player has to go through a steroid test before the game starts. A false positive can ruin the career of a Great sportsman and a false negative can make the game unfair.
Can you explain the difference between a Test Set and a Validation Set?
Validation set can be considered as a part of the training set as it is used for parameter selection and to avoid Overfitting of the model being built. On the other hand, test set is used for testing or evaluating the performance of a trained machine leaning model.
In simple terms ,the differences can be summarized as-
Training Set is to fit the parameters i.e. weights.
Test Set is to assess the performance of the model i.e. evaluating the predictive power and generalization.
Validation set is to tune the parameters.
What are Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues?
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.
Can you cite some examples where a false positive is important than a false negative?
Let us first understand what false positives and false negatives are. False positives are the cases where you wrongly classified a non-event as an event a.k.a Type I error. False negatives are the cases where you wrongly classify events as non-events, a.k.a Type II error.
Example 1: In the medical field, assume you have to give chemotherapy to patients. Assume a patient comes to that hospital and he is tested positive for cancer, based on the lab prediction but he actually doesn’t have cancer. This is a case of false positive. Here it is of utmost danger to start chemotherapy on this patient when he actually does not have cancer. In the absence of cancerous cell, chemotherapy will do certain damage to his normal healthy cells and might lead to severe diseases, even cancer.
Example 2: Let’s say an e-commerce company decided to give $1000 Gift voucher to the customers whom they assume to purchase at least $10,000 worth of items. They send free voucher mail directly to 100 customers without any minimum purchase condition because they assume to make at least 20% profit on sold items above $10,000. Now the issue is if we send the $1000 gift vouchers to customers who have not actually purchased anything but are marked as having made $10,000 worth of purchase.
The extent of the missing values is identified after identifying the variables with missing values. If any patterns are identified the analyst has to concentrate on them as it could lead to interesting and meaningful business insights.
If there are no patterns identified, then the missing values can be substituted with mean or median values (imputation) or they can simply be ignored. Assigning a default value which can be mean, minimum or maximum value. Getting into the data is important.
If it is a categorical variable, the default value is assigned. The missing value is assigned a default value. If you have a distribution of data coming, for normal distribution give the mean value.
If 80% of the values for a variable are missing then you can answer that you would be dropping the variable instead of treating the missing values.
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| Softtek Most Frequently Asked Data Science Interview Questions Answers |
In any 15-minute interval, there is a 20% probability that you will see at least one shooting star. What is the probability that you see at least one shooting star in the period of an hour?
Probability of not seeing any shooting star in 15 minutes is
= 1 – P( Seeing one shooting star )
= 1 – 0.2 = 0.8
Probability of not seeing any shooting star in the period of one hour
= (0.8) ^ 4 = 0.4096
Probability of seeing at least one shooting star in the one hour
= 1 – P( Not seeing any star )
= 1 – 0.4096 = 0.5904
How can you generate a random number between 1 – 7 with only a die?
Any die has six sides from 1-6. There is no way to get seven equal outcomes from a single rolling of a die. If we roll the die twice and consider the event of two rolls, we now have 36 different outcomes.
To get our 7 equal outcomes we have to reduce this 36 to a number divisible by 7. We can thus consider only 35 outcomes and exclude the other one.
A simple scenario can be to exclude the combination (6,6), i.e., to roll the die again if 6 appears twice.
All the remaining combinations from (1,1) till (6,5) can be divided into 7 parts of 5 each. This way all the seven sets of outcomes are equally likely.
A certain couple tells you that they have two children, at least one of which is a girl. What is the probability that they have two girls?
In the case of two children, there are 4 equally likely possibilities
BB, BG, GB and GG;
where B = Boy and G = Girl and the first letter denotes the first child.
From the question, we can exclude the first case of BB. Thus from the remaining 3 possibilities of BG, GB & BB, we have to find the probability of the case with two girls.
Thus, P(Having two girls given one girl) = 1 / 3
What is the advantage of performing dimensionality reduction before fitting an SVM?
Support Vector Machine Learning Algorithm performs better in the reduced space. It is beneficial to perform dimensionality reduction before fitting an SVM if the number of features is large when compared to the number of observations.
How do data management procedures like missing data handling make selection bias worse?
Missing value treatment is one of the primary tasks which a data scientist is supposed to do before starting data analysis. There are multiple methods for missing value treatment. If not done properly, it could potentially result into selection bias. Let see few missing value treatment examples and their impact on selection-
Complete Case Treatment: Complete case treatment is when you remove entire row in data even if one value is missing. You could achieve a selection bias if your values are not missing at random and they have some pattern. Assume you are conducting a survey and few people didn’t specify their gender. Would you remove all those people? Can’t it tell a different story?
Available case analysis: Let say you are trying to calculate correlation matrix for data so you might remove the missing values from variables which are needed for that particular correlation coefficient. In this case your values will not be fully correct as they are coming from population sets.
Mean Substitution: In this method missing values are replaced with mean of other available values.This might make your distribution biased e.g., standard deviation, correlation and regression are mostly dependent on the mean value of variables.
Hence, various data management procedures might include selection bias in your data if not chosen correctly.
Can you cite some examples where a false negative important than a false positive?
Assume there is an airport ‘A’ which has received high security threats and based on certain characteristics they identify whether a particular passenger can be a threat or not. Due to shortage of staff they decided to scan passenger being predicted as risk positives by their predictive model.
What will happen if a true threat customer is being flagged as non-threat by airport model?
Another example can be judicial system. What if Jury or judge decide to make a criminal go free?
What if you rejected to marry a very good person based on your predictive model and you happen to meet him/her after few years and realize that you had a false negative?
Can you cite some examples where both false positive and false negatives are equally important?
In the banking industry giving loans is the primary source of making money but at the same time if your repayment rate is not good you will not make any profit, rather you will risk huge losses.
Banks don’t want to lose good customers and at the same point of time they don’t want to acquire bad customers. In this scenario both the false positives and false negatives become very important to measure.
These days we hear many cases of players using steroids during sport competitions Every player has to go through a steroid test before the game starts. A false positive can ruin the career of a Great sportsman and a false negative can make the game unfair.
Can you explain the difference between a Test Set and a Validation Set?
Validation set can be considered as a part of the training set as it is used for parameter selection and to avoid Overfitting of the model being built. On the other hand, test set is used for testing or evaluating the performance of a trained machine leaning model.
In simple terms ,the differences can be summarized as-
Training Set is to fit the parameters i.e. weights.
Test Set is to assess the performance of the model i.e. evaluating the predictive power and generalization.
Validation set is to tune the parameters.
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