
Data Science Interview Questions - eaguyhn
https://hackernoon.com/160-data-science-interview-questions-415s3y2a
======
Tarrosion
I would consider it a strong negative signal if a company used this kind of
question for anything more than a very quick initial screen - a sort of "data
science FizzBuzz." Firstly, most of these questions are things that a
reasonably smart person with the right technical background could just look up
on Wikipedia or in a textbook, etc. - why base your interview on whether the
candidate has bothered to memorize a bunch of easily at hand knowledge? More
importantly, none of these questions focus on the parts of a data science job
that--for almost all data scientists--are actually the most difficult and
subtle: understanding your data and where it came from, disentangling
confounds, communicating results, understanding the right question to answer,
etc.

~~~
chestervonwinch
For example,

> What kind of CNN architectures for classification do you know?

Is rated as an expert level question, but reads more like "what are some of
your favorite pokemon?".

~~~
Cacti
I can almost guarantee you that this is because "deep learning" is considered
"advanced DS" in most corporate settings. DS has gotten so broad that, if you
try to fit everything into a single category (rather than breaking it out into
sub-areas like ML Engineer, Data Engineer, Research Scientistic, etc.), this
is what you end up with. What "advanced" here really means is "relatively new
field."

You can't ask someone just out of a stats program about CNNs because they
probably have never touched them, even though for someone doing a lot of DL
work in CS may consider this trivial, so you mark it as intermediate. And you
can't ask someone with 10 years of pre-DL experience in DS about CNNs because
they've been doing forests and regression and clustering and such, so you move
it from intermediate to advanced.

In other words, it's "advanced" because HR wants to make sure it's "optional".

------
melling
This blogger has questions and answers:

[40 Statistics Interview Problems and Answers for Data Scientists
]([https://towardsdatascience.com/40-statistics-interview-
probl...](https://towardsdatascience.com/40-statistics-interview-problems-and-
answers-for-data-scientists-6971a02b7eee))

[Amazon’s Data Scientist Interview Practice Problems
]([https://towardsdatascience.com/amazon-data-scientist-
intervi...](https://towardsdatascience.com/amazon-data-scientist-interview-
practice-problems-15b9b86e86c6))

[Microsoft Data Science Interview Questions and
Answers]([https://towardsdatascience.com/microsoft-data-science-
interv...](https://towardsdatascience.com/microsoft-data-science-interview-
questions-and-answers-69ccac16bd9b))

------
jl2718
Making a list of questions is the easy part. There are intricacies to all of
them. Understanding that is the hard part.

For those with an advanced degree in statistics, what % of DS interviewers
remotely understand the questions they ask?

I was great at interviewing. Then I took the time to really learn it, and made
myself unhireable. So now I moved to a field where I am ignorant, and
everybody seems brilliant again.

~~~
rytill
> made myself unhireable

you mean because your answers weren't cookie-cutter enough?

~~~
pvaldes
He/she talks about negative selection, probably

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melling
No answers. Any recommendations on books or blogs to learn data science?

I working through this book, which I do like:

[https://www.amazon.com/Data-Science-Scratch-Principles-
Pytho...](https://www.amazon.com/Data-Science-Scratch-Principles-
Python/dp/1492041130/)

I’m rewriting the examples in Swift to help me learn:

[https://github.com/melling/data-science-from-scratch-
swift](https://github.com/melling/data-science-from-scratch-swift)

Something with a little more theory might be good. Lots of the questions seem
to require more theoretical knowledge.

~~~
alexanderchr
I can really recommend Introduction to statistical learning by James, Witten,
Hastie and Tibshirani if you are looking for something that covers the theory
without going into too much detail.

There is also Elements of statistical learning by the same authors if you are
looking for something more rigorous. I haven’t read very much of it but it is
supposed to very good too.

------
RandyRanderson
The first time I loaded this page they had a female-looking icon as
intermediate and a somewhat-male looking icon for expert. It now has a star
and rocketship, res.

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heligate229
what is considered good data science interview questions? I think it depends
on the purpose of the company.

------
known
[http://archive.vn/GDEDj](http://archive.vn/GDEDj)

------
geebee
How odd our field really is. Many of these questions are basic stats. Others
seem like the kind of statistics process control I learned in my undergraduate
engineering curriculum. Some are more modern, and would be learned by going
through something like the scikit-learn documentation, or taking a coursera,
though I suppose this might be in a more current formal curriculum.

The odd part is, do senior actuaries get quizzed on integration by parts when
they interview? Do law firms put new hires through their 1L civil procedure
exam?

And while those are fields with a standardized entrance exam (actuarial exams,
bar exam, etc), I know lots of people in non-credentialed fields that still
are knowledge based. They may get asked about a database or their experience
with it, but they don't go through anything like this kind of technical exam
style interview. It really is an exam, it's just administered capriciously,
often by people who have unknown or dodgy credentials, without any review by
experts or assurances that it won't be used to discriminate (the modern day
equivalent of a "literacy" test, I suppose), and is graded under conditions of
great secrecy (people often sign a non-disclosure prior to interviewing,
google asks people to do this).

I personally think a company is well within its rights to do subject
experienced people to an eternal cycle of undergraduate midterms if that's
what it chooses to do. I think that this practice deters a lot of people from
going into these fields as well, which is also their right as free and full
members of the society they live in, free to choose a career path in response
to their own interests and how they align with what employers want and what
they're offering.

But... well, here we go. The companies that do this are almost always talking
about a shortage of workers, one that the government needs to solve (or at
least mitigate) by creating a special visa that allows employers to decide who
is allowed to work in the united states and the conditions under which they
are allowed to remain. Conditions that, surprise surprise, often involve
working in a field that subjects people to an endless repeats of their
undergraduate midterms. When people with choice won't choose a particular job,
isn't that the market's answer? Just to be clear, I positive about
immigration, provided the people who immigrate are, well, free. But why on
earth would we create a special corporate controlled worker visa so that
companies can continue to engage in practices that drive away people who can
choose, in large numbers?

This is the pits, people. Don't these lists bug you just a little? I mean, I'm
not trying to put down the list itself, I suppose it's probably a pretty good
list for people who are going to subject themselves to this kind of interview
exam, either because they like the field or because it's the only way to get
through the US's byzantine immigration system without relatives.

But is it really a surprise that people with choice (i.e., the "free" citizens
of Rome who are not bound by law to work only in certain fields as a condition
of remaining within Rome) are rationally choosing to do things where they
don't have to put up with this bullshit?

