2016 Data Science Interview

Questions for Top Tech Companies

11 Jan 2016

Latest Update made on January 10,2017.

Data Science has become an integral part of making crucial business

decisions in todays competitive market. This is one of the reasons
companies are on a rampage to hire Data Scientists and qualied ones at
that. The data science job interviews at companies like Facebook, Google,
LinkedIn, AirBnB, Insight, Twitter, Mu Sigma have one thing in common
these interviews are tough. But we have a list of helpful data science
interview questions from these companies that will help while someone is
preparing to apply for the post of a Data Scientist.

CLICK HERE to get the 2016 data scientist salary report delivered to your
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At a recent Big Data panel, organised by the Silicon Valley Bank in Boston,
almost every speaker unanimously agreed that the time to hire Data
Scientists was yesterday. Theoretically, Data Scientists should be able to look
at a companys data and gure out to make the data protable for the
business. It is not academics. Playing around with data and experimenting
on it with dierent algorithms is not going to help in the long run if the
business needs are not met. It is getting very dicult for companies to nd
qualied data scientists who understand that their projects will ultimately
need to make money for the company. Most of the time the data based
models that the data scientists work on, cannot be turned into protable
relevant applications. This is the reason the interview process for Data
Scientists at any company is rigorous and complicated. Finding Data
Scientists who not only have the necessary technical skill but also have the
knowledge of the industry and the acumen to understand business needs.

Companies need to see value at the end of the day. Hiring a Data Scientist
no matter how cool it may be in theory, if they do not bring value to the
company is a loss. To avoid such scenarios, it is imperative that a company
rst understand what kind of data they have, how much data they have
and what kind of possible projects a Data Scientist can work on based on the
data. Below we have listed some of the questions asked in Data Science
Interviews, in the companies that have gured out why they need Data
Scientists and what output they need from data science projects.

Questions from Data Science

Interviews at Top Tech Companies
These questions listed here are after a thorough research of the companies
sites and high quality discussion forums. This is not a guarantee that these
very questions will be asked in data science interviews, but this is just to give
the readers an idea of what can be expected when they apply for the
position of Data Scientists in these tech companies.

Learn Data Science in Python to Land a Top Gig as a Data Scientist at Top
Tech Companies!

Facebook Data Science Interview

Questions
1) A building has 100 oors. Given 2 identical eggs, how can you use
them to nd the threshold oor? The egg will break from any particular oor
above oor N, including oor N itself.

2) In a given day, how many birthday posts occur on Facebook?

3) You are at a Casino. You have two dices to play with. You win $10
every time you roll a 5. If you play till you win and then stop, what is the
expected pay-out?
4) How many big Macs does McDonald sell every year in US?

5) You are about to get on a plane to Seattle, you want to know whether
you have to bring an umbrella or not. You call three of your random friends
and as each one of them if its raining. The probability that your friend is
telling the truth is 2/3 and the probability that they are playing a prank on
you by lying is 1/3. If all 3 of them tell that it is raining, then what is the
probability that it is actually raining in Seattle.

6) You can roll a dice three times. You will be given $X where X is the
highest roll you get. You can choose to stop rolling at any time (example, if
you roll a 6 on the rst roll, you can stop). What is your expected pay-out?

7) How can bogus Facebook accounts be detected?

8) You have been given the data on Facebook users friending or

defriending each other. How will you determine whether a given pair of
Facebook users are friends or not?

9) How many dentists are there in US?

10) You have 2 dices. What is the probability of getting at least one 4?
Also nd out the probability of getting at least one 4 if you have n dices.

11) Pick up a coin C1 given C1+C2 with probability of trials p (h1) =.7, p
(h2) =.6 and doing 10 trials. And what is the probability that the given coin
you picked is C1 given you have 7 heads and 3 tails?

12) You are given two tables- friend_request and request_accepted.

Friend_request contains requester_id, time and sent_to_id and
request_accepted table contains time, acceptor_id and requestor_id. How
will you determine the overall acceptance rate of requests?

13) How would add new Facebook members to the database of

members, and code their relationships to others in the database?
14) What would you add to Facebook and how would you pitch it and
measure its success?

15) How will you test that there is increased probability of a user to stay
active after 6 months given that a user has more friends now?

16) You have two tables-the rst table has data about the users and their
friends, the second table has data about the users and the pages they have
liked. Write an SQL query to make recommendations using pages that your
friends liked. The query result should not recommend the pages that have
already been liked by a user.

17) What is the probability of pulling a dierent shape or a dierent colour

card from a deck of 52 cards?

18) Which technique will you use to compare the performance of two back-
end engines that generate automatic friend recommendations on Facebook?

19) Implement a sorting algorithm for a numerical dataset in Python.

20) How many people are using Facebook in California at 1.30 PM on

Monday?

21) You are given 50 cards with ve dierent colors- 10 Green cards, 10 Red
Cards, 10 Orange Cards, 10 Blue cards, and 10 Yellow cards. The cards of
each colors are numbered from one to ten. Two cards are picked at random.
Find out the probability that the cards picked are not of same number and
same color.

22) What approach will you follow to develop the love,like, sad feature on
Facebook?

Insight Data Science Interview Questions

1) Which companies participating in Insight would you be interested in

working for?

2) Create a program in a language of your choice to read a text le with

various tweets. The output should be 2 text les-one that contains the list of
all unique words among all tweets along with the count for repeated words
and the second le should contain the medium number of unique words for
all tweets.

3) What motivates you to transition from academia to data science?

Twitter Data Scientist Interview Questions

1) How can you measure engagement with given Twitter data?

2) Give a large dataset, nd the median.

3) What is the good measure of inuence of a Twitter user?

AirBnB Data Science Interview Questions

1) Do you have some knowledge of R - analyse a given dataset in R?

2) What will you do if removing missing values from a dataset cause bias?

3) How can you reduce bias in a given data set?

4) How will you impute missing information in a dataset?

Google Data Science Interview Questions

1) Explain about string parsing in R language

2) A disc is spinning on a spindle and you dont know the direction in which
way the disc is spinning. You are provided with a set of pins.How will you use
the pins to describe in which way the disc is spinning?

3) Describe the data analysis process.

4) How will you cut a circular cake into 8 equal pieces?

LinkedIn Data Science Interview Questions

1) Find out K most frequent numbers from a given stream of numbers on

the y.

2) Given 2 vectors, how will you generate a sorted vector?

3) Implementing pow function

4) What kind of product you want to build at LinkedIn?

5) How will you design a recommendation engine for jobs?

6) Write a program to segment a long string into a group of valid words

using Dictionary. The result should return false if the string cannot be
segmented. Also explain about the complexity of the devised solution.

7) Dene an algorithm to discover when a person is starting to search for

new job.

8) What are the factors used to produce People You May Know data
product on LinkedIn?

9) How will you nd the second largest element in a Binary Search tree ?
(Asked for a Data Scientist Intern job role)

Mu Sigma Data Science Interview Questions

1) Explain the dierence between Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

through examples.
2) How would you add value to the company through your projects?

3) Case Study based questions Cars are implanted with speed tracker so
that the insurance companies can track about our driving state. Based on
this new scheme what kind of business questions can be answered?

4) Dene standard deviation, mean, mode and median.

5) What is a joke that people say about you and how would you rate the joke
on a scale of 1 to 10?

6) You own a clothing enterprise and want to improve your place in the
market. How will you do it from the ground level ?

Amazon Data Science Interview Questions

1) Estimate the probability of a disease in a particular city given that the

probability of the disease on a national level is low.

2) How will inspect missing data and when are they important for your
analysis?

3) How will you decide whether a customer will buy a product today or not
given the income of the customer, location where the customer lives,
profession and gender? Dene a machine learning algorithm for this.

4) From a long sorted list and a short 4 element sorted list, which algorithm
will you use to search the long sorted list for 4 elements.

5) How can you compare a neural network that has one layer, one input and
output to a logistic regression model?

6) How do you treat colinearity?

7) How will you deal with unbalanced data where the ratio of negative and
positive is huge?
8) What is the dierence between -

i) Stack and Queue

ii) Linkedin and Array

Uber Data Science Interview Questions

1) Will Uber cause city congestion?

2) What are the metrics you will use to track if Ubers paid advertising
strategies to acquire customers work? How will you gure out the acceptable
cost of customer acquisition?

3) Explain principal components analysis with equations.

4) Explain about the various time series forecasting technqiues.

5) Which machine learning algoritthm will you use to solve a Uber driver
accepting request?

6)How will you compare the results of various machine learning algorithms?

7) How to solve multi-collinearity?

8) How will you design the heatmap for Uber drivers to provide
recommendation on where to wait for passengers? How would you
approach this?

Netix Data Science Interview Questions

1) How can you build and test a metric to compare ranked list of TV shows or
Movies for two Netix users?

2) How can you decide if one algorithm is better than the other?
Microsoft Data Science Interview Questions

1) Write a function to check whether a particular word is a palindrome or

not.

2) How can you compute an inverse matrix faster by playing with some
computation tricks?

3) You have a bag with 6 marbles. One marble is white. You reach the bag
100 times. After taking out a marble, it is placed back in the bag. What is the
probability of drawing a white marble at least once?

Apple Data Science Interview Questions

1) How do you take millions of users with 100's of transactions each,

amongst 10000's of products and group the users together in a meaningful
segments?

Adobe Data Scientist Interview Questions

1) Check whether a given integer is a palindrome or not without converting it

to a string.

2) What is the degree of freedom for lasso?

3) You have two sorted array of integers, write a program to nd a number

from each array such that the sum of the two numbers is closest to an
integer i.

American Express Data Scientist Interview

Questions

1) Suppose that American Express has 1 million card members along with
their transaction details. They also have 10,000 restaurants and 1000 food
coupons. Suggest a method which can be used to pass the food coupons to
users given that some users have already received the food coupons so far.

2) You are given a training dataset of users that contain their demographic
details, the pages on Facebook they have liked so far and results of
psychology test based on their personality i.e. their openness to like FB
pages or not. How will you predict the age, gender and other demographics
of unseen data?

Quora Data Scientist Interview Questions

1) How will you test a machine learning model for accuracy?

2) Print the elements of a matrix in zig-zag manner.

3) How will you overcome overtting in predictive models?

4) Develop an algorithm to sort two lists of sorted integers into a single list.

Goldman Sachs Data Scientist Interview

Questions

1) Count the total number of trees in United States.

2) Estimate the number of square feet pizzas eaten in US each year.

3) A box has 12 red cards and 12 black cards. Another box has 24 red cards
and 24 black cards. You want to draw two cards at random from one of the
two boxes, which box has a higher probability of getting cards of same
colour and why?

4) How will you prove that the square root of 2 is irrational?

5) What is the probability of getting a HTT combination before getting a TTH

combination?

6) There are 8 identical balls and only one of the ball is slightly heavier than
the others. You are given a balance scale to nd the heavier ball. What is the
least number of times you have to use the balance scale to nd the heavier
ball?

Walmart Data Science Interview Questions

1) Write the code to reverse a Linked list.

2) What assumptions does linear regression machine learning algorithm

make?

3) A stranger uses a search engine to nd something and you do not know

anything about the person. How will you design an algorithm to determine
what the stranger is looking for just after he/she types few characters in the
search box?

4) How will you x multi-colinearity in a regression model?

5) What data structures are available in the Pandas package in Python

programming language?

6) State some use cases where Hadoop MapReduce works well and where it
does not.

7) What is the dierence between an iterator, generator and list

comprehension in Python?

8) What is the dierence between a bagged model and a boosted model?

9) What do you understand by parametric and non-parametric methods?

Explain with examples.

10) Have you used sampling? What are the various types of sampling have
you worked with?

IBM Data Science Interview Questions

1) How will you handle missing data ?

Yammer Data Science Interview Questions

1. How can you solve a problem that has no solution?

2. On rolling a dice if you get $1 per dot on the upturned face,what are your
expected earnings from rolling a dice?

3. In continuation with question #2, if you have 2 chances to roll the dice
and you are given the opportunity to decide when to stop rolling the dice
(in the rst roll or in the second roll). What will be your rolling strategy to
get maximum earnings?

4. What will be your expected earnings with the two roll strategy?

5. You are creating a report for user content uploads every month and
observe a sudden increase in the number of upload for the month of
November. The increase in uploads is particularly in image uploads. What
do you think will be the cause for this and how will you test this sudden
spike?

Citi Bank Data Science Interview Questions

1) A dice is rolled twice, what is the probability that on the second chance it
will be a 6?

2) What are Type 1 and Type 2 errors ?

3) Burn two ropes, one needs 60 minutes of time to burn and the other
needs 30 minutes of time. How will you achieve this in 45 minutes of time ?

Data Science Interview Questions Asked at Other

Top Tech Companies

1) R programming language cannot handle large amounts of data. What are

the other ways of handling it without using Hadoop infrastructure? (Asked at
Pyro Networks)

2) Explain the working of a Random Forest Machine Learning Algorithm

(Asked at Cyient)

3) Describe K-Means Clustering.(Asked at Symphony Teleca)

4) What is the dierence between logistic and linear regression? (Asked at

Symphony Teleca)

5) What kind of distribution does logistic regression follow? (Asked at

Symphony Teleca)

6) How do you parallelize machine learning algorithms? (Asked at Vodafone)

7) When required data is not available for analysis, how do you go about
collecting it? (Asked at Vodafone)

8) What do you understand by heteroscadisticity (Asked at Vodafone)

9) What do you understand by condence interval? (Asked at Vodafone)

10) Dierence between adjusted r and r square. (Asked at Vodafone)

11) How Facebook recommends items to newsfeed? (Asked at Finomena)

12) What do you understand by ROC curve and how is it used? (Asked at
MachinePulse)
13) How will you identify the top K queries from a le? (Asked at
BloomReach)

14) Given a set of webpages and changes on the website, how will you test
the new website feature to determine if the change works positively? (Asked
at BloomReach)

15) There are N pieces of rope in a bucket. You put your hand into the
bucket, take one end piece of the rope .Again you put your hand into the
bucket and take another end piece of a rope. You tie both the end pieces
together. What is the expected value of the number of loops within the
bucket? (Asked at Natera)

16) How will you test if a chosen credit scoring model works or not? What
data will you look at? (Asked at Square)

17) There are 10 bottles where each contains coins of 1 gram each. There is
one bottle of that contains 1.1 gram coins. How will you identify that bottle
after only one measurement? (Data Science Puzzle asked at Latent View
Analytics)

18) How will you measure a cylindrical glass lled with water whether it is
exactly half lled or not? You cannot measure the water, you cannot
measure the height of the glass nor can you dip anything into the glass.
(Data Science Puzzle asked at Latent View Analytics)

19) What would you do if you were a trac sign? (Data Science Interview
Question asked at Latent View Analytics)

20) If you could get the dataset on any topic of interest, irespective of the
collection methods or resources then how would the dataset look like and
what will you do with it. (Data Scientist Interview Question asked at CKM
Advisors)
21) Given n samples from a uniform distribution [0,d], how will you estimate
the value of d? (Data Scientist Interview Question asked at Spotify)

22) How will you tune a Random Forest? (Data Science Interview Question
asked at Instacart).

23) Tell us about a project where you have extracted useful information from
a large dataset. Which machine learning algorithm did you use for this and
why? (Data Scientist Interview Question asked at Greenplum)

24) What is the dierence between Z test and T test ? (Data Scientist
Interview Questions asked at Antuit)

25) What are the dierent models you have used for analysis and what were
your inferences? (Data Scientist Interview Questions asked at Cognizant)

26) Given the title of a product, identify the category and sub-category of the
product. (Data Scientist interview question asked at Delhivery)

27) What is the dierence between machine learning and deep learning? (
Data Scientist Interview Question asked at InfoObjects)

28) What are the dierent parameters in ARIMA models ? (Data Science
Interview Question asked at Morgan Stanley)

29) What are the optimisations you would consider when computing the
similarity matrix for a large dataset? (Data Science Interview questions asked
at MakeMyTrip)

30) Use Python programming language to implement a toolbox with specic

image processing tasks.(Data Science Interview Question asked at Intuitive
Surgical)

31) Why do you use Random Forest instead of a simple classier for one of
the classication problems ? (Data Science Interview Question asked at Audi)
32) What is an n-gram? (Data Science Interview Question asked at Yelp)

33) What are the problems related to Overtting and Undertting and how
will you deal with these ? (Data Science Interview Question asked at Tiger
Analytics)

34) Given a MxN dimension matrix with each cell containing an alphabet,
nd if a string is contained in it or not.(Data Science Interview Question
asked at Tiger Analytics)

If you are asked questions like what is your favourite leisure activity? Or
something like what is that you like to do for fun? Most of the people often
tend to answer that they like to read programming books or do coding
thinking that this is what they are supposed to say in a technical interview. Is
this something you really do it for fun? A key point to bear in mind that the
interviewer is also a person and interact with them as a person naturally.
This will help the interviewer see you as an all-rounder who can visualize the
companys whole vision and not just view business problems from an
academic viewpoint.

You might also be interested to read :

100 Data Science Interview Questions and Answers (General)

100 Data Science in Python Interview Questions and Answers

100 Data Science in R Interview Questions and Answers

Data Science Resume Tips

We request the data science community to help the prospective data

scientists prepare for data science interviews.Share with us in comments
below about the various kinds of data science interview questions asked at
various top tech companies which are not listed above.
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