Interview questions I have faced till now ...

1. write equation for linear regression.

2. write equation for logistic regression
3. how will You calculate AUCROC value manually.
4. what performance metrics you used in model building
5. Assumptions of linear regression.
6. differt ways you used to treat missing values and outliers.
7 . feature selection
8 . explain decision tree.
9 . difference between k-means and knn
10. what is k in knn
11. Explain every step you did in your project. (most important)
12. Confusion matrics.
13. why we use cross-validation
14. what is pruning of decision tree and why we do it.
15. If we have 100gb of data , how will you manage to build model on your machine.
16. central limit theorm.

@@@@ sql question.

1. how will convert DD/MM/YYYY to sql date format DD-MM-YYYY

2. Difference between truncate, drop, delete

3. sequence of executions of functions in the given example.
4. get sum , avg, percentage of category in data.
5. get 1st 3 letter of name
6. what is schemas
7. what are datatypes in sql.
8. output for outerjoin , inner join.
10. write selct query for given example.

PS: If you have your questions to share ,please write in comment section.

2. Answere to all queries are accepted.

#sql #datascience #interviewquestions #analytics

52. How does parallel processing in XG Boost works? (Remember it is boosting so

tree are dependent on the above tree )
53. Why Light GBM is faster than XG Boost?
54. What is difference between parameters and hyper parameters?
55. What are different hyperpaarmeters in all the above algorithms?
56. How do you find best hyper-parameters?
57. What is Bias Variance tradeoff?
58. What is Overfitting under fitting and best fit?
59. How do you identify whether model is fitting well or over fitted or under
fitting?
60. What is the difference between objective and evaluation functions?
61. How do you select the best evaluation metrics?
62. What is curse of dimensionality?
63. How do interpret coefficient of logistic regression?
64. What are p values?
65. Describe the math�s of logistic regression?
66. How do interpret coeffs of linear regression?
67. How does decision tree work in case of regression?
68. How does Catboost tackle categorical variables ?
69. What happens to the coeffs if you do regularization but variables are highly
correlated variables?
70. Assumptions of linear regression?

i Knw python. questions are mostly asked on data cleaning , joins, lamda and map
functions. handling date time data . go with pandas and numpy concepts and some
visualisation codes u used in ur projects

Q.7. y=ax+b is a linear model. Can you tell me if y=ax^2 + bx + c is also a linear
model ?
Ans. y=ax^2 + bx + c is also linear as x^2 can also be represented as X.
So, the actual relationship might not be linear but the model fitted is linear

Q.8. What is SSE and RMSE ? Why to use RMSE and not SSE ?
Ans. RMSE has mean value but SSE is total value.

Q.9. Does a low RMSE denote overfitting ?

Q.10. How to resolve overfitting ?
Ans. 1. Cross-validation
2. Regularization
3. Ensembling
Q.11. Why knn is not a model ?
Ans.11. It is a lazy model.

Q.1. What is Regression ? What is Classification ?

Ans. Regression : Target variable continous.
Classification : Target variable is discrete

Q.2. What are the error metrics used for both of them ?
Ans. Regression : SSE
Classification : Confusion metrics

Q.3. Why Accuracy does not help when there is a class imbalance ?
Ans. Because accuracy gets drawn by the majority class.

Q.4. How to handle class imbalance ?

Ans. 1. Use performance metrics as Area Under ROC Curve
2. Penalize Algorithms
3. Use Tree-Based Algorithms like RF, Gradient Boosted Trees

Q.5. What is knn ?

Q.6. What is k-means ?
K-nearest neighbors is a classification algorithm, which is a subset of supervised
learning.
K-means is a clustering algorithm, which is a subset of unsupervised learning.
Q.1. Brief on my work history.
Q.2. Classification techniques : K-means clustering. Any other techniques ?
Q.3. Can the following equation be a linear regression :
y=ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d
Q.4. Assumptions in linear regression.
Q.5. What is multicollinearity ?
Q.6. What happens in case of logistic regression ?
Q.7. What is SVM, Random Forest ?
Q.8. How do you transform data from a 2D space to a 3D space ?
Q.9. When to use Random Forest ?
Q.10. What does each node of a decision tree represent and how is the tree formed ?

Q.1. What is supervised and unsupervised learning ?

Q.2. How to form clusters ? How to create centroid ?
Q.3. What is knn ? How to determine k ?
Q.4. What is bias vs variance ?
Q.5. What is overfitting in general ? How to determine if knn is overfitting ?
Q.6. Measures to counter overfitting.
Q.7. What action needs to be taken if there is multi-collinearity ?
Q.8. What is Precision ? Recall ?
Q.9. Which one is more important ? in which scenarios ?
Q.10. ROCR curve
Q.11. Lambdas in Python
Q.12. List comprehension in Python

PGP in Big Data Analytics and Optimization at International School of Engineering

(INSOFE)
Q.1. What is supervised and unsupervised learning ?
Q.2. How to form clusters ? How to create centroid ?
Q.3. What is knn ? How to determine k ?
Q.4. What is bias vs variance ?
Q.5. What is overfitting in general ? How to determine if knn is overfitting ?
Q.6. Measures to counter overfitting.
Q.7. What action needs to be taken if there is multi-collinearity ?
Q.8. What is Precision ? Recall ?
Q.9. Which one is more important ? in which scenarios ?
Q.10. ROCR curve
Q.11. Lambdas in Python
Q.12. List comprehension in Python

Q.1. What is a logit in logistic regression ?

Q.2. How to classify 3 or more classes in logistic regression ?
Q.3. What is regularization ?
Q.4. Difference between Lasso (L1 regularization) & Ridge (L2 regularization).
Q.5. If a problem is given how do you decide the Null Hypothesis ? What are the
next steps ?
Q.6. Difference between supervised and unsupervised learning.
Q.7. What is hyper-parameter tuning ? How to tune a Random Forest ?
Q.8. What is SVM ?
Q.9. What is ensemble learning ?
Q.10. Difference between bagging and boosting. Give examples of both and explain
why.
Q.11. How to go about missing values ?
Q.12. When do you drop a particular column containing missing values ?
Q.13. What is PCA ?
Q.14. Difference between bias and variance.
Q.15. How to reduce bias in random forest ?
Q.16. How to select a cutoff value in ROCR curve ?
Q.17. What does the x-axis and y-axis represent in ROCR curve ?
Q.18. Once a dataset is given, what are the next steps before using machine
learning algorithms ?
Q.19. How to increase the performance of a machine learning algorithm ?
Q.20. What is OOB error in Random forest ?
Q.21. How does boosting help as compared to bagging ?
Q.22. What is XGBoost ?

1. Explain about yourself

2. Explain the projects that you worked for
3. What is the difference between logistic and linear
4. What is Sigmoid function
5. What is the difference between sigmoid and softmax function
6. what is validation
7. what is statification
8. what is bootstrap validation
9. What is cost function
10. Why is cost function so important in model
11. When did you apply cost function
12. What is optimizer
13.I have 10 Million records with 60 features, what is your approch to build a
logistic regression
a. which validation you choose
b. which model you choose
c. Which optimizer you choose
d list the optimizers you know and explain the best one you choose for this
problem
e. Where do you get the data ? is it from online or warehouse?

How to do feature Engineering in SVM

What are disadvantages of Naive Bayes over Logistic Regression
Explian Precision and Recall

14.what is clustering and explain various clustering algorithms

15. Write psudo code of Density based clustering
16.Have you ever worked on SVM ? tell me the advantages
17. What is the node entropy
18. How is Rnadom forest is different from Xgboost
19. What are the most significant parameters for the xgboost
20 Why you preferr XG boost for both Liner and logistic
21. What is PCA
22. I applied PCA on 50 features and how many new feature will I get
23 WHat is Eigan vector
24. How you deploy your model into production
25. What Hadoop cluster you are using

Q.1. What is Decision Tree ? How to split ? How does decision tree work ?
Q.2. What does each node contain in a Decision Tree ?
Q.3. What is Entropy and Genie Index and how does it help ?
Q.4. What is Random Forest ? What is Random in Random Forest ? How to calculate OOB
Error ?
Q.5. How does random forest work ?
Q.6. Explain the entire process from the point you get the data till you reach the
final stage of prediction.
Q.7. How does knn work ? Which distance algorithm to use in knn when data is
categorical ?
Q.8. You have 10 documents. Each topic has been tagged with a topic. Once a new
document comes, how to tag it to one of those topics ?

Q.1. What is a logit in logistic regression ?

Q.2. How to classify 3 or more classes in logistic regression ?
Q.3. What is regularization ?
Q.4. Difference between Lasso (L1 regularization) & Ridge (L2 regularization).
Q.5. If a problem is given how do you decide the Null Hypothesis ? What are the
next steps ?
Q.6. Difference between supervised and unsupervised learning.
Q.7. What is hyper-parameter tuning ? How to tune a Random Forest ?
Q.8. What is SVM ?
Q.9. What is ensemble learning ?
Q.10. Difference between bagging and boosting. Give examples of both and explain
why.
Q.11. How to go about missing values ?
Q.12. When do you drop a particular column containing missing values ?
Q.13. What is PCA ?
Q.14. Difference between bias and variance.
Q.15. How to reduce bias in random forest ?
Q.16. How to select a cutoff value in ROCR curve ?
Q.17. What does the x-axis and y-axis represent in ROCR curve ?
Q.18. Once a dataset is given, what are the next steps before using machine
learning algorithms ?
Q.19. How to increase the performance of a machine learning algorithm ?
Q.20. What is OOB error in Random forest ?
Q.21. How does boosting help as compared to bagging ?
Q.22. What is XGBoost ?

1. Explain about yourself

2. Explain the projects that you worked for
3. What is the difference between logistic and linear
4. What is Sigmoid function
5. What is the difference between sigmoid and softmax function
6. what is validation
7. what is statification
8. what is bootstrap validation
9. What is cost function
10. Why is cost function so important in model
11. When did you apply cost function
12. What is optimizer
13.I have 10 Million records with 60 features, what is your approch to build a
logistic regression
a. which validation you choose
b. which model you choose
c. Which optimizer you choose
d list the optimizers you know and explain the best one you choose for this
problem
e. Where do you get the data ? is it from online or warehouse?

How to do feature Engineering in SVM

What are disadvantages of Naive Bayes over Logistic Regression
Explian Precision and Recall

14.what is clustering and explain various clustering algorithms

15. Write psudo code of Density based clustering
16.Have you ever worked on SVM ? tell me the advantages
17. What is the node entropy
18. How is Rnadom forest is different from Xgboost
19. What are the most significant parameters for the xgboost
20 Why you preferr XG boost for both Liner and logistic
21. What is PCA
22. I applied PCA on 50 features and how many new feature will I get
23 WHat is Eigan vector
24. How you deploy your model into production
25. What Hadoop cluster you are using

1) what is the logic behind the python programs that were asked
2) what is softmax function.. explain mathematically
3) what is auc curve.. write a function to plot that.. what is the X axis and y
axis
4) a few questions on decision tree.
5) Random forest
6) let's say a dice is biased and probability of even number is twice of odd.. what
is the expected sum of numbers in nice for 100,000 experiments.
7) how to control over fit in different models
8) how do you know linear regression model is doing well..
9) what does coefficients of logistic regression mean?
10) what is odds?
11) what is idf
12) what is elbow curve in k means clustering
13) what is R square and explain mathematical equations
14) how does rules get extracted in decision tree
15) what is homogenity
16) explain the project you have worked...
17) how do you detect outliers.
18) how does box plot get plotted..the whiskers and all.. how do you detect
outliers there
19)do you know how to use regular expressions.. tell me how you would extract to
email address from the email

ANS 6-
I have used fillna method of pandas dataframe for missing values. i have also used
scikit learn preprocessing library

to detect outliers i have used z-score.

Ans 10-
firstly knn means the k nearest neighbours
and in knn, k denotes the no of neighbours that you want to use in your algorithm
to predict the label
for ex
if k=3
then your algorithm will find the distance of first 3 nearest data points

ANS 9-
k-means is a clustring algorithm and comes under unsupervised learning. In kmeans
we try to predict the clusters in an unlabelled data by claculating the mean of the
similar items and repeating this same process for some time.
where as Knn is an classification algorithm where we calculate the distance of k
nearest neighbours of the particular data point and checking their label and
classify that particular point as one of the label which has come most of the times
in those k neibhours.

18. How do I create linear models if I have very high dimensional data?
(Regularization solves this but mostly want to listen PCA/ removing correlated
variables etc.)
19. What if learning rate is too high or too small while minimizing an objective
function using gradient descent?
20. What is a concave and convex function? Why we prefer convex objective
functions?
21. What is the difference between L1 and l2 regularizations?
22. When will be use L1 vs L2 and vice versa?
23. How gradient descent is applied to l1 regularization? ( l1 regularization
term is non differentiable) ?
24. What is clustering?
25. What is K means Clustering?
26. How do you use ordinal, categorical variables in clustering?
27. What if we have high dimensional data? How do we use apply clustering? (As
distance measure like Euclidean fails for high dimensional data)
28. What are the problems with K means clustering?
29. How do you decide optimal number of clusters?
30. How do you evaluate goodness of clusters? (basic intuition is quantify intra
and inter clusters distance so that intra cluster is minimum and inter cluster is
maximum.. this page helps� https://scikit-
learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html#clustering-performance-evaluation)

Interview questions list:

1. What is a Normal distribution?
2. What are other types of distributions?
3. Why we assume in linear regression that errors are normally distributed?
4. What are the ways to standardize data?
5. How do you tackle missing values?
6. Difference between supervised and unsupervised learning?
7. Describe complete machine learning Pipeline from raw data to final model?
8. How do you tackle imbalanced classes? (Up sampling/down sampling/class
weights / Generating synthetic data (SMOTE etc.)/ changing evaluation metrics)
9. What are the metrics used for regression & classifications?
10. Why we accuracy does not work for imbalance classes?
11. What is precision /recall /AUC /TPR/FPR etc..
12. What is linear Regression?
13. What is logistic Regression?
14. Why standardization is required for linear models?
15. How does outliers effect are models?
16. What if we do not do standardize the data while creating linear models?
17. Why Gradient descent if linear regression can be solved using matrix
multiplications/factorization?
18. How do I create linear models if I have very high dimensional data?
(Regularization solves this but mostly want to listen PCA/ removing correlated
variables etc.)

What are the key differences between Regression and classification?

Define Elbow method?
How multilayer perception works?

31. Suppose I have two variables which form concentric circles. Which
transformation should be applied so that k means can be applied?
32. What are dimensionality reduction techniques?
33. What is PCA?
34. How do we interpret components of PCA? What do they represent?
35. What is Non Negative matrix Factorization?
36. How do you visualize high dimensional data?
37. When to use PCA or Non Negative Matrix factorization?
38. What is difference between likelihood and probability?
39. What is maximum likelihood estimations algorithm?
40. What are other clustering techniques if K means does not work?
41. What is K median algorithm?
42. What is Decision Tree? ( How split is decided )
43. Why they are prone to overfitting? How do we overcome this problem?
44. What is Bagging and Boosting?
45. Which one is more prone to overfitting?
46. What is Random forest?
47. How variable importance is calculated in Random Forest?
48. How will the testing metrics be impacted if we create 100, 1000, 10000,
100000 and so on till billion tress. AT every step how will it change?
49. How does boosting works?
50. Difference between Gradient Boosting | XG Boost |Light GBM and Cat boost?
51. Why XG boost is so fast?

Q) What is regularisation? How does Ridge regularisation penalise the weights of

features in real world applications? Is Lasso a form of feature selection?

1. Explain linear regression to a non-statistician.

2. What are the assumptions in linear & logistic regression ?
3. How to resolve overfitting (in general) ?
4. Explain K-means clustering algorithm.
5. Explain bias vs variance.
6. How to remove multicolinearity ?
7. How and when to do PCA ?

Q.1. What is the formula for logit in logistic regression ?

Q.2. What is the meaning of logit ?
Q.3. What is meant by bias and variance ?
Q.4. How to detect outliers ? Once they are detected how to handle them ?
Q.5. Does Q2 in box plot represent mean or median ?
Q.6. Walk me through the process of data analysis once you receive data from your
client.
Q.7. What is confusion matrix ?
Q.8. Formula for accuracy and what does it mean ?
Q.9. What is OOB error in Decision Tree ?
Q.10. What is meant by pruning ?
Q.11. How to standardize using z score ?
Q.12. What is bagging ? Give examples.
Q.13. Which is better bagging or boosting ? And in which kind of scenarios.
Q.14. What does the ROC curve represent ?
Q.15. What does the cut-off signify in ROC curve ?
Q.16. What to do if many features are correlated ?
Q.17. What is Single Value Decomposition ?
Q.18. What is co-variance ? How to calculate it ?
Q.19. How to interpret correlation plot ?
Q.20. What other plots do you use to gain insight from the data ?
Q.21. What does the following plots signify - Bar plots, histograms, scatter plots
Q.22. Explain slope in logistic regression equation.
Q.23. What is Principal Component Analysis ? What is the resultant that you get
after doing PCA ?

Q.12. Write code in Python for the following problems :

(a)
bookings table :
id, date, platform
1, 12/3, android
2, 12/3, ios
3, 13/3, android
4, 13/3, ios
5, 13/3, android
6, 14/3, ios
7, 14/3, android
For each date, how many bookings are from android and how many from ios ?
Answer :
df1 = pd.read_csv("MMT.csv")
df1.groupby(['date', 'platform']).count()

(b)
data = ['cat', 'bat', 'rat', 'cat', 'rat']
Give the count of each unique element of the list
Answer :
import pandas as pd
data = ['cat', 'bat', 'rat', 'cat', 'rat']
df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns=['Category'])
vc = df['Category'].value_counts()