51 Machine Learning Interview Questions With Answers - Springboard

11/11/22, 7:17 AM 51 Machine Learning Interview Questions with Answers | Springboard
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51 Essential Machine Learning Interview

Questions and Answers
Roger Huang Roger Huang | 24 minute read | April 20, 2022
Machine learning interview questions are an integral part of the data science interview and the
path to becoming a data scientist, machine learning engineer, or data engineer.
Springboard has created a free guide to data science interviews, where we learned exactly how
these interviews are designed to trip up candidates! In this blog, we have curated a list of 51 key
machine learning interview questions that you might encounter in a machine learning interview.
https://www.springboard.com/blog/data-science/machine-learning-interview-questions/ 1/20
We’ve also provided some handy answers to go along with them so you can ace your machine
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learning job interview (or machine learning internship).
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looking for a more comprehensive insight into machine learning career options, check
out our guides on how to become a data scientist and how to become a data engineer.
Finally, don’t forget to check out Springboard’s Machine Learning Engineering Career Track, which
comes complete with a six-month job guarantee.
Machine Learning Interview Questions: 4

Categories
We’ve traditionally seen machine learning interview questions pop up in several categories.
1. The first really has to do with the algorithms and theory behind machine learning. You’ll have
to show an understanding of how algorithms compare with one another and how to measure
their efficacy and accuracy in the right way.
2. The second category has to do with your programming skills and your ability to execute on
top of those algorithms and the theory.
3. The third has to do with your general interest in machine learning. You’ll be asked about
what’s going on in the industry and how you keep up with the latest machine learning trends.
4. Finally, there are company or industry-specific questions that test your ability to take your
general machine learning knowledge and turn it into actionable points to drive the bottom line
forward.
We’ve divided this guide to machine learning interview questions into the categories we
mentioned above so that you can more easily get to the information you need when it comes to
machine learning interview questions.
Machine Learning Interview Questions: Algorithms/Theory

Machine learning interview questions about ML algorithms will test your grasp of the theory
behind machine learning.
Q1: What’s the trade-off between bias and variance?

Answer: Bias is error due to erroneous or overly simplistic assumptions in the learning algorithm
you’re using. This can lead to the model underfitting your data, making it hard for it to have high
predictive accuracy and for you to generalize your knowledge from the training set to the test set.
Variance is error due to too much complexity in the learning algorithm you’re using. This leads to
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the algorithm being highly sensitive to high degrees of variation in your training data, which can
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lead your model to overfit the data. You’ll be carrying too much noise from your training data for
your model to be very useful for your test data.
The bias-variance decomposition essentially decomposes the learning error from any algorithm
by adding the bias, the variance and a bit of irreducible error due to noise in the underlying
dataset. Essentially, if you make the model more complex and add more variables, you’ll lose bias
but gain some variance — in order to get the optimally reduced amount of error, you’ll have to
tradeoff bias and variance. You don’t want either high bias or high variance in your model.
More reading: Bias-Variance Tradeoff (Wikipedia)
Q2: What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine

learning?
Answer: Supervised learning requires training labeled data. For example, in order to do
classification (a supervised learning task), you’ll need to first label the data you’ll use to train the
model to classify data into your labeled groups. Unsupervised learning, in contrast, does not
require labeling data explicitly.
More reading: Classic examples of supervised vs. unsupervised learning (Springboard)
Q3: How is KNN different from k-means clustering?

Answer: K-Nearest Neighbors is a supervised classification algorithm, while k-means clustering is
an unsupervised clustering algorithm. While the mechanisms may seem similar at first, what this
really means is that in order for K-Nearest Neighbors to work, you need labeled data you want to
classify an unlabeled point into (thus the nearest neighbor part). K-means clustering requires only
a set of unlabeled points and a threshold: the algorithm will take unlabeled points and gradually
learn how to cluster them into groups by computing the mean of the distance between different
points.
The critical difference here is that KNN needs labeled points and is thus supervised learning, while
k-means doesn’t—and is thus unsupervised learning.
More reading: How is the k-nearest neighbor algorithm different from k-means clustering? (Quora)
Q4: Explain how a ROC curve works.

Answer: The ROC curve is a graphical representation of the contrast between true positive rates
and the false positive rate at various thresholds. It’s often used as a proxy for the trade-off
between the sensitivity of the model (true positives) vs the fall-out or the probability it will trigger
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a false alarm (false positives).
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More reading: Receiver operating characteristic (Wikipedia)
Q5: Define precision and recall.

Answer: Recall is also known as the true positive rate: the amount of positives your model claims
compared to the actual number of positives there are throughout the data. Precision is also
known as the positive predictive value, and it is a measure of the amount of accurate positives
your model claims compared to the number of positives it actually claims. It can be easier to think
of recall and precision in the context of a case where you’ve predicted that there were 10 apples
and 5 oranges in a case of 10 apples. You’d have perfect recall (there are actually 10 apples, and
you predicted there would be 10) but 66.7% precision because out of the 15 events you predicted,
only 10 (the apples) are correct.
Explanation: Out of a sample size of 15 (10 apples + 5 oranges), you have identified 10 apples as
apples BUT you have also incorrectly predicted 5 oranges as apples. This implies that the true
positive figure is 10 (10 correctly identified apples), whereas the false positive figure is 5 (5
oranges incorrectly tagged as apples).
As per the formula of Precision = True Positive / (True Positive + False Positive), therefore the
precision rate is 67%.
As per the Recall formula = True Positive / (True Positive + False Negative), hence the recall rate
is 100%. This is because not a single apple was incorrectly predicted as an orange.
More reading: Precision and recall (Wikipedia)

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Q6: What is Bayes’ Theorem?Students
Blogin a machine learning
How is it useful
context?
Answer: Bayes’ Theorem gives you the posterior probability of an event given what is known as
prior knowledge.
Mathematically, it’s expressed as the true positive rate of a condition sample divided by the
sum of the false positive rate of the population and the true positive rate of a condition. Say you
had a 60% chance of actually having the flu after a flu test, but out of people who had the flu, the
test will be false 50% of the time, and the overall population only has a 5% chance of having the
flu. Would you actually have a 60% chance of having the flu after having a positive test?
Bayes’ Theorem says no. It says that you have a (.6 * 0.05) (True Positive Rate of a Condition
Sample) / (.6*0.05)(True Positive Rate of a Condition Sample) + (.5*0.95) (False Positive Rate of a
Population) = 0.0594 or 5.94% chance of getting a flu.
Bayes’ Theorem is the basis behind a branch of machine learning that most notably includes the
Naive Bayes classifier. That’s something important to consider when you’re faced with machine
learning interview questions.
More reading: An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem (BetterExplained)
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Q7: Why is “Naive” Bayes naive?

Answer: Despite its practical applications, especially in text mining, Naive Bayes is considered
“Naive” because it makes an assumption that is virtually impossible to see in real-life data: the
conditional probability is calculated as the pure product of the individual probabilities of

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components. This implies the absolute independence of features — a condition probably never
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met in real life.
As a Quora commenter put it whimsically, a Naive Bayes classifier that figured out that you liked
pickles and ice cream would probably naively recommend you a pickle ice cream.
More reading: Why is “naive Bayes” naive? (Quora)
Q8: Explain the difference between L1 and L2 regularization.

Answer: L2 regularization tends to spread error among all the terms, while L1 is more
binary/sparse, with many variables either being assigned a 1 or 0 in weighting. L1 corresponds to
setting a Laplacean prior on the terms, while L2 corresponds to a Gaussian prior.
More reading: What is the difference between L1 and L2 regularization? (Quora)
Q9: What’s your favorite algorithm, and can you explain it to me in less than
a minute?
Answer: Interviewers ask such machine learning interview questions to test your understanding
of how to communicate complex and technical nuances with poise and the ability to summarize
quickly and efficiently. While answering such questions, make sure you have a choice and ensure
you can explain different algorithms so simply and effectively that a five-year-old could grasp the
basics!
Q10: What’s the difference between Type I and Type II error?

Answer: Don’t think that this is a trick question! Many machine learning interview questions will
be an attempt to lob basic questions at you just to make sure you’re on top of your game and
you’ve prepared all of your bases.
Type I error is a false positive, while Type II error is a false negative. Briefly stated, Type I error
means claiming something has happened when it hasn’t, while Type II error means that you claim
nothing is happening when in fact something is.
A clever way to think about this is to think of Type I error as telling a man he is pregnant, while
Type II error means you tell a pregnant woman she isn’t carrying a baby.
More reading: Type I and type II errors (Wikipedia)
Q11: What’s a Fourier transform?
Answer: A Fourier transform is a generic method to decompose generic functions into a

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superposition of symmetric functions. Or as this more intuitive tutorial puts it, given a smoothie,
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it’s how we find the recipe. The Fourier transform finds the set of cycle speeds, amplitudes, and
phases to match any time signal. A Fourier transform converts a signal from time to frequency
domain—it’s a very common way to extract features from audio signals or other time series such
as sensor data.
More reading: Fourier transform (Wikipedia)
Q12: What’s the difference between probability and likelihood?

More reading: What is the difference between “likelihood” and “probability”? (Cross Validated)
Q13: What is deep learning, and how does it contrast with other machine
learning algorithms?
Answer: Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that is concerned with neural networks:
how to use backpropagation and certain principles from neuroscience to more accurately model
large sets of unlabelled or semi-structured data. In that sense, deep learning represents an
unsupervised learning algorithm that learns representations of data through the use of neural
nets.
More reading: Deep learning (Wikipedia)
Q14: What’s the difference between a generative and discriminative model?

Answer: A generative model will learn categories of data while a discriminative model will simply
learn the distinction between different categories of data. Discriminative models will generally
outperform generative models on classification tasks.
More reading: What is the difference between a Generative and Discriminative Algorithm? (Stack
Overflow)
Q15: What cross-validation technique would you use on a time series

dataset?
Answer: Instead of using standard k-folds cross-validation, you have to pay attention to the fact
that a time series is not randomly distributed data—it is inherently ordered by chronological order.
If a pattern emerges in later time periods, for example, your model may still pick up on it even if
that effect doesn’t hold in earlier years!
You’ll want to do something like forward chaining where you’ll be able to model on past data then
look at forward-facing data.
Fold 1 : training [1], test [2]

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Fold 2 : training [1 2], test [3]
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Fold 3 : training [1 2 3], test [4]
Fold 4 : training [1 2 3 4], test [5]
Fold 5 : training [1 2 3 4 5], test [6]
More reading: Using k-fold cross-validation for time-series model selection (CrossValidated)
Q16: How is a decision tree pruned?

Answer: Pruning is what happens in decision trees when branches that have weak predictive
power are removed in order to reduce the complexity of the model and increase the predictive
accuracy of a decision tree model. Pruning can happen bottom-up and top-down, with approaches
such as reduced error pruning and cost complexity pruning.
Reduced error pruning is perhaps the simplest version: replace each node. If it doesn’t decrease
predictive accuracy, keep it pruned. While simple, this heuristic actually comes pretty close to an
approach that would optimize for maximum accuracy.
More reading: Pruning (decision trees)
Q17: Which is more important to you: model accuracy or model

performance?
Answer: Such machine learning interview questions tests your grasp of the nuances of machine
learning model performance! Machine learning interview questions often look towards the details.
There are models with higher accuracy that can perform worse in predictive power—how does
that make sense?
Well, it has everything to do with how model accuracy is only a subset of model performance, and
at that, a sometimes misleading one. For example, if you wanted to detect fraud in a massive
dataset with a sample of millions, a more accurate model would most likely predict no fraud at all
if only a vast minority of cases were fraud. However, this would be useless for a predictive model
—a model designed to find fraud that asserted there was no fraud at all! Questions like this help
you demonstrate that you understand model accuracy isn’t the be-all and end-all of model
performance.
More reading: Accuracy paradox (Wikipedia)
Q18: What’s the F1 score? How would you use it?

Answer: The F1 score is a measure of a model’s performance. It is a weighted average of the
precision and recall of a model, with results tending to 1 being the best, and those tending to 0
being the worst. You would use it in classification tests where true negatives don’t matter much.
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More reading: F1 score (Wikipedia) Students
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Q19: How would you handle an imbalanced dataset?
Answer: An imbalanced dataset is when you have, for example, a classification test and 90% of
the data is in one class. That leads to problems: an accuracy of 90% can be skewed if you have no
predictive power on the other category of data! Here are a few tactics to get over the hump:
1. Collect more data to even the imbalances in the dataset.

2. Resample the dataset to correct for imbalances.
3. Try a different algorithm altogether on your dataset.
What’s important here is that you have a keen sense for what damage an unbalanced dataset can
cause, and how to balance that.
More reading: 8 Tactics to Combat Imbalanced Classes in Your Machine Learning Dataset
(Machine Learning Mastery)
Q20: When should you use classification over regression?

Answer: Classification produces discrete values and dataset to strict categories, while regression
gives you continuous results that allow you to better distinguish differences between individual
points. You would use classification over regression if you wanted your results to reflect the
belongingness of data points in your dataset to certain explicit categories (ex: If you wanted to
know whether a name was male or female rather than just how correlated they were with male
and female names.)
More reading: Regression vs Classification (Math StackExchange)
Q21: Name an example where ensemble techniques might be useful.

Answer: Ensemble techniques use a combination of learning algorithms to optimize better
predictive performance. They typically reduce overfitting in models and make the model more
robust (unlikely to be influenced by small changes in the training data).
You could list some examples of ensemble methods (bagging, boosting, the “bucket of models”
method) and demonstrate how they could increase predictive power.
More reading: Ensemble learning (Wikipedia)
Q22: How do you ensure you’re not overfitting with a model?
Answer: This is a simple restatement of a fundamental problem in machine learning: the

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possibility of overfitting training data and carrying the noise of that data through to the test set,
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thereby providing inaccurate generalizations.
There are three main methods to avoid overfitting:
1. Keep the model simpler: reduce variance by taking into account fewer variables and
parameters, thereby removing some of the noise in the training data.
2. Use cross-validation techniques such as k-folds cross-validation.
3. Use regularization techniques such as LASSO that penalize certain model parameters if
they’re likely to cause overfitting.
More reading: How can I avoid overfitting? (Quora)
Q23: What evaluation approaches would you work to gauge the

effectiveness of a machine learning model?
Answer: You would first split the dataset into training and test sets, or perhaps use cross-
validation techniques to further segment the dataset into composite sets of training and test sets
within the data. You should then implement a choice selection of performance metrics: here is a
fairly comprehensive list. You could use measures such as the F1 score, the accuracy, and the
confusion matrix. What’s important here is to demonstrate that you understand the nuances of
how a model is measured and how to choose the right performance measures for the right
situations.
More reading: How to Evaluate Machine Learning Algorithms (Machine Learning Mastery)
Q24: How would you evaluate a logistic regression model?

Answer: A subsection of the question above. You have to demonstrate an understanding of what
the typical goals of a logistic regression are (classification, prediction, etc.) and bring up a few
examples and use cases.
More reading: Evaluating a logistic regression (CrossValidated), Logistic Regression in Plain

English
More reading: How a Machine Learning Algorithm Helped Make Hurricane Damage Assessments
Safer, Cheaper, and More Effective
Q25: What’s the “kernel trick” and how is it useful?

Answer: The Kernel trick involves kernel functions that can enable in higher-dimension spaces
without explicitly calculating the coordinates of points within that dimension: instead, kernel
functions compute the inner products between the images of all pairs of data in a feature space.
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This allows them the very useful attribute of calculating the coordinates of higher dimensions
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while being computationally cheaper than the explicit calculation of said coordinates. Many
algorithms can be expressed in terms of inner products. Using the kernel trick enables us
effectively run algorithms in a high-dimensional space with lower-dimensional data.
More reading: Kernel method (Wikipedia)
Machine Learning Interview Questions: Programming

These machine learning interview questions test your knowledge of programming principles you
need to implement machine learning principles in practice. Machine learning interview questions
tend to be technical questions that test your logic and programming skills: this section focuses
more on the latter.
Q26: How do you handle missing or corrupted data in a dataset?

Answer: You could find missing/corrupted data in a dataset and either drop those rows or
columns, or decide to replace them with another value.
In Pandas, there are two very useful methods: isnull() and dropna() that will help you find columns
of data with missing or corrupted data and drop those values. If you want to fill the invalid values
with a placeholder value (for example, 0), you could use the fillna() method.
More reading: Handling missing data (O’Reilly)
Q27: Do you have experience with Spark or big data tools for machine
learning?
Answer: You’ll want to get familiar with the meaning of big data for different companies and the
different tools they’ll want. Spark is the big data tool most in demand now, able to handle
immense datasets with speed. Be honest if you don’t have experience with the tools demanded,
but also take a look at job descriptions and see what tools pop up: you’ll want to invest in
familiarizing yourself with them.
More reading: 50 Top Open Source Tools for Big Data (Datamation)
Q28: Pick an algorithm. Write the pseudo-code for a parallel

implementation.
Answer: This kind of question demonstrates your ability to think in parallelism and how you could
handle concurrency in programming implementations dealing with big data. Take a look at
pseudocode frameworks such as Peril-L and visualization tools such as Web Sequence

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Diagrams to help you demonstrate your ability to write code that reflects parallelism.
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reading: Writing pseudocode for parallel programming (Stack Overflow) Categories
Q29: What are some differences between a linked list and an array?
Answer: An array is an ordered collection of objects. A linked list is a series of objects with
pointers that direct how to process them sequentially. An array assumes that every element has
the same size, unlike the linked list. A linked list can more easily grow organically: an array has to
be pre-defined or re-defined for organic growth. Shuffling a linked list involves changing which
points direct where—meanwhile, shuffling an array is more complex and takes more memory.
More reading: Array versus linked list (Stack Overflow)
Q30: Describe a hash table.

Answer: A hash table is a data structure that produces an associative array. A key is mapped to
certain values through the use of a hash function. They are often used for tasks such as database
indexing.
More reading: Hash table (Wikipedia)
Q31: Which data visualization libraries do you use? What are your thoughts
on the best data visualization tools?
Answer: What’s important here is to define your views on how to properly visualize data and your
personal preferences when it comes to tools. Popular tools include R’s ggplot, Python’s seaborn
and matplotlib, and tools such as Plot.ly and Tableau.
More reading: 31 Free Data Visualization Tools (Springboard)
Related: 20 Python Interview Questions
Q32: Given two strings, A and B, of the same length n, find whether it is

possible to cut both strings at a common point such that the first part of A
and the second part of B form a palindrome.
Answer: You’ll often get standard algorithms and data structures questions as part of your
interview process as a machine learning engineer that might feel akin to a software engineering
interview. In this case, this comes from Google’s interview process. There are multiple ways to
check for palindromes—one way of doing so if you’re using a programming language such as
Python is to reverse the string and check to see if it still equals the original string, for example.
The thing to look out for here is the category of questions you can expect, which will be akin to
software engineering questions that drill down to your knowledge of algorithms and data
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structures. Make sure that you’re totally comfortable with the language of your choice to express
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that logic.
More reading: Glassdoor ML interview questions
Q33: How are primary and foreign keys related in SQL?

Answer: Most machine learning engineers are going to have to be conversant with a lot of
different data formats. SQL is still one of the key ones used. Your ability to understand how to
manipulate SQL databases will be something you’ll most likely need to demonstrate. In this
example, you can talk about how foreign keys allow you to match up and join tables together on
the primary key of the corresponding table—but just as useful is to talk through how you would
think about setting up SQL tables and querying them.
More reading: What is the difference between a primary and foreign key in SQL? and 105 SQL
interview questions
Q34: How does XML and CSVs compare in terms of size?

Answer: In practice, XML is much more verbose than CSVs are and takes up a lot more space.
CSVs use some separators to categorize and organize data into neat columns. XML uses tags to
delineate a tree-like structure for key-value pairs. You’ll often get XML back as a way to semi-
structure data from APIs or HTTP responses. In practice, you’ll want to ingest XML data and try to
process it into a usable CSV. This sort of question tests your familiarity with data wrangling
sometimes messy data formats.
More reading: How Can XML Be Used?
Q35: What are the data types supported by JSON?

Answer: This tests your knowledge of JSON, another popular file format that wraps with
JavaScript. There are six basic JSON datatypes you can manipulate: strings, numbers, objects,
arrays, booleans, and null values.
More reading: JSON datatypes
Q36: How would you build a data pipeline?

Answer: Data pipelines are the bread and butter of machine learning engineers, who take data
science models and find ways to automate and scale them. Make sure you’re familiar with the
tools to build data pipelines (such as Apache Airflow) and the platforms where you can host
models and pipelines (such as Google Cloud or AWS or Azure). Explain the steps required in a
functioning data pipeline and talk through your actual experience building and scaling them in
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reading: Categories
10 Minutes to Building A Machine Learning Pipeline With Apache Airflow
Machine Learning Interview Questions: Company/Industry Specific

These machine learning interview questions deal with how to implement your general machine
learning knowledge to a specific company’s requirements. You’ll be asked to create case studies
and extend your knowledge of the company and industry you’re applying for with your machine
learning skills.
Q37: What do you think is the most valuable data in our business?
Answer: This question or questions like it really try to test you on two dimensions. The first is your
knowledge of the business and the industry itself, as well as your understanding of the business
model. The second is whether you can pick how correlated data is to business outcomes in
general, and then how you apply that thinking to your context about the company. You’ll want to
research the business model and ask good questions to your recruiter—and start thinking about
what business problems they probably want to solve most with their data.
More reading: Three Recommendations For Making The Most Of Valuable Data
Q38: How would you implement a recommendation system for our

company’s users?
Answer: A lot of machine learning interview questions of this type will involve the implementation
of machine learning models to a company’s problems. You’ll have to research the company and
its industry in-depth, especially the revenue drivers the company has, and the types of users the
company takes on in the context of the industry it’s in.
More reading: How to Implement A Recommendation System? (Stack Overflow)
Q39: How can we use your machine learning skills to generate revenue?
Answer: This is a tricky question. The ideal answer would demonstrate knowledge of what drives
the business and how your skills could relate. For example, if you were interviewing for music-
streaming startup Spotify, you could remark that your skills at developing a better
recommendation model would increase user retention, which would then increase revenue in the
long run.
The startup metrics Slideshare linked above will help you understand exactly what performance
indicators are important for startups and tech companies as they think about revenue and growth.
More reading: Startup Metrics for Startups (500 Startups)

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Q40: What do you think of our
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current data process?
Answer: This kind of question requires you to listen carefully and impart feedback in a manner
that is constructive and insightful. Your interviewer is trying to gauge if you’d be a valuable
member of their team and whether you grasp the nuances of why certain things are set the way
they are in the company’s data process based on company or industry-specific conditions. They’re
trying to see if you can be an intellectual peer. Act accordingly.
More reading: The Data Science Process Email Course (Springboard)
Machine Learning Interview Questions:

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This series of machine learning interview questions attempt to gauge your passion and interest in
machine learning. The right answers will serve as a testament to your commitment to being a
lifelong learner in machine learning.
Q41: What are the last machine learning papers you’ve read?
Answer: Keeping up with the latest scientific literature on machine learning is a must if you want
to demonstrate an interest in a machine learning position. This overview of deep learning in
Nature by the scions of deep learning themselves (from Hinton to Bengio to LeCun) can be a good
reference paper and an overview of what’s happening in deep learning — and the kind of paper you
might want to cite.
More reading: What are some of the best research papers/books for machine learning?
Q42: Do you have research experience in machine learning?

Answer: Related to the last point, most organizations hiring for machine learning positions will
look for your formal experience in the field. Research papers, co-authored or supervised by
leaders in the field, can make the difference between you being hired and not. Make sure you have
a summary of your research experience and papers ready—and an explanation for your
background and lack of formal research experience if you don’t.
Q43: What are your favorite use cases of machine learning models?
Answer: The Quora thread below contains some examples, such as decision trees that categorize
people into different tiers of intelligence based on IQ scores. Make sure that you have a few
examples in mind and describe what resonated with you. It’s important that you demonstrate an
interest in how machine learning is implemented.
More reading: What are the typical use cases for different machine learning algorithms? (Quora)
Q44: How would you approach the “Netflix Prize” competition?

Answer: The Netflix Prize was a famed competition where Netflix offered $1,000,000 for a better
collaborative filtering algorithm. The team that won called BellKor had a 10% improvement and
used an ensemble of different methods to win. Some familiarity with the case and its solution will
help demonstrate you’ve paid attention to machine learning for a while.
More reading: Netflix Prize (Wikipedia)
Q45: Where do you usually source datasets?

Answer: Machine learning interview questions like these try to get at the heart of your machine
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learning interest. Somebody who is truly passionate about machine learning will have gone off
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and done side projects on their own, and have a good idea of what great datasets are out there. If
you’re missing any, check out Quandl for economic and financial data, and Kaggle’s
Datasets collection for another great list.
More reading: 19 Free Public Data Sets For Your First Data Science Project (Springboard)
Q46: How do you think Google is training data for self-driving cars?
Answer: Machine learning interview questions like this one really test your knowledge of different
machine learning methods, and your inventiveness if you don’t know the answer. Google is
currently using recaptcha to source labeled data on storefronts and traffic signs. They are also
building on training data collected by Sebastian Thrun at GoogleX—some of which was obtained
by his grad students driving buggies on desert dunes!
More reading: Waymo Tech
Q47: How would you simulate the approach AlphaGo took to beat Lee Sedol
at Go?
Answer: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol, the best human player at Go, in a best-of-five series was a
truly seminal event in the history of machine learning and deep learning. The Nature paper above
describes how this was accomplished with “Monte-Carlo tree search with deep neural networks
that have been trained by supervised learning, from human expert games, and by reinforcement
learning from games of self-play.”
More reading: Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (Nature)
Q48: What are your thoughts on GPT-3 and OpenAI’s model?

Answer: GPT-3 is a new language generation model developed by OpenAI. It was marked as
exciting because with very little change in architecture, and a ton more data, GPT-3 could generate
what seemed to be human-like conversational pieces, up to and including novel-size works and
the ability to create code from natural language. There are many perspectives on GPT-3
throughout the Internet — if it comes up in an interview setting, be prepared to address this topic
(and trending topics like it) intelligently to demonstrate that you follow the latest advances in
machine learning.
More reading: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Q49: What models do you train for fun, and what GPU/hardware do you
use?
Answer: Such machine learning interview questions tests whether you’ve worked on machine
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learning projects outside of a corporate role and whether you understand the basics of how to
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resource projects and allocate GPU-time efficiently. Expect questions like this to come from hiring
managers that are interested in getting a greater sense behind your portfolio, and what you’ve
done independently.
More reading: Where to get free GPU cloud hours for machine learning
Q50: What are some of your favorite APIs to explore?

Answer: If you’ve worked with external data sources, it’s likely you’ll have a few favorite APIs that
you’ve gone through. You can be thoughtful here about the kinds of experiments and pipelines
you’ve run in the past, along with how you think about the APIs you’ve used before.
More reading: Awesome APIs
Q51: How do you think quantum computing will affect machine learning?
Answer: With the recent announcement of more breakthroughs in quantum computing, the
question of how this new format and way of thinking through hardware serves as a useful proxy
to explain classical computing and machine learning, and some of the hardware nuances that
might make some algorithms much easier to do on a quantum machine. Demonstrating some
knowledge in this area helps show that you’re interested in machine learning at a much higher
level than just implementation details.
Machine learning and data science are driving a technological revolution. As a result, data
scientists and machine learning professionals are in high demand.
More reading: Quantum Machine Learning
Since you’re here…
Thinking about a career in data science? Enroll in our Data Science Bootcamp, and we’ll get
you hired in 6 months. If you’re just getting started, take a peek at our foundational Data
Science Course, and don’t forget to peep our student reviews. The data’s on our side.
This post was originally published in 2017. It has been updated to include more current
information.
Roger Huang
About Roger Huang
Roger has always been inspired to learn more. He has written for Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, The
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Next Web, VentureBeat, and Techvibes. Previously, he led Content Marketing and Growth efforts
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at Springboard.
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11/11/22, 7:17 AM 51 Machine Learning Interview Questions with Answers | Springboard

51 Essential Machine Learning Interview

Machine Learning Interview Questions: 4

Machine Learning Interview Questions: Algorithms/Theory

Q1: What’s the trade-off between bias and variance?

More reading: Bias-Variance Tradeoff (Wikipedia)

Q2: What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine

More reading: Classic examples of supervised vs. unsupervised learning (Springboard)

Q3: How is KNN different from k-means clustering?

Q4: Explain how a ROC curve works.

Q5: Define precision and recall.

More reading: Precision and recall (Wikipedia)

More reading: An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem (BetterExplained)

Get To Know Other Data Science Students

Q7: Why is “Naive” Bayes naive?

conditional probability is calculated as the pure product of the individual probabilities of

More reading: Why is “naive Bayes” naive? (Quora)

Q8: Explain the difference between L1 and L2 regularization.

More reading: What is the difference between L1 and L2 regularization? (Quora)

Q10: What’s the difference between Type I and Type II error?

More reading: Type I and type II errors (Wikipedia)

Q11: What’s a Fourier transform?

Answer: A Fourier transform is a generic method to decompose generic functions into a

More reading: Fourier transform (Wikipedia)

Q12: What’s the difference between probability and likelihood?

More reading: Deep learning (Wikipedia)

Q14: What’s the difference between a generative and discriminative model?

Q15: What cross-validation technique would you use on a time series

Fold 1 : training [1], test [2]

More reading: Using k-fold cross-validation for time-series model selection (CrossValidated)

Q16: How is a decision tree pruned?

More reading: Pruning (decision trees)

Q17: Which is more important to you: model accuracy or model

More reading: Accuracy paradox (Wikipedia)

Q18: What’s the F1 score? How would you use it?

1. Collect more data to even the imbalances in the dataset.

Q20: When should you use classification over regression?

More reading: Regression vs Classification (Math StackExchange)

Q21: Name an example where ensemble techniques might be useful.

More reading: Ensemble learning (Wikipedia)

Q22: How do you ensure you’re not overfitting with a model?

Answer: This is a simple restatement of a fundamental problem in machine learning: the

More reading: How can I avoid overfitting? (Quora)

Q23: What evaluation approaches would you work to gauge the

Q24: How would you evaluate a logistic regression model?

More reading: Evaluating a logistic regression (CrossValidated), Logistic Regression in Plain

Q25: What’s the “kernel trick” and how is it useful?

More reading: Kernel method (Wikipedia)

Machine Learning Interview Questions: Programming

Q26: How do you handle missing or corrupted data in a dataset?

More reading: Handling missing data (O’Reilly)

Q28: Pick an algorithm. Write the pseudo-code for a parallel

pseudocode frameworks such as Peril-L and visualization tools such as Web Sequence

More reading: Array versus linked list (Stack Overflow)

Q30: Describe a hash table.

More reading: Hash table (Wikipedia)

More reading: 31 Free Data Visualization Tools (Springboard)

Related: 20 Python Interview Questions

Q32: Given two strings, A and B, of the same length n, find whether it is