Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

Data Analyst Interview Questions to

prepare for in 2018
22 Dec 2016

Last Update made on March 20, 2018

This list of data analyst interview questions is based on the

responsibilities handled by data analysts.However, the questions in a
data analytic job interview may vary based on the nature of work
expected by an organization. If you are planning to appear for a data
analyst job interview, these interview questions for data analysts will
help you land a top gig as a data analyst at one of the top tech
companies.

Robert Half Technology survey of 1400 CIOʼs revealed that 53% of the
companies were actively collecting data but they lacked sufficient skilled
data analysts to access the data and extract insights. Data analysts are in
great demand and sorely needed with many novel data analyst job positions
emerging in business domains like healthcare, fintech, transportation, retail,
etc. The job role of a data analyst involves collecting data and analysing it
using various statistical techniques. The end goal of a data analyst is to
provide organisations with reports that can contribute to faster and better
decision making process. As data analysts salaries continue to rise with the
entry level data analyst earning an average of $50,000-$75,000 and
experienced data analyst salary ranging from $65,000-$110,000, many IT
professionals are embarking on a career as a Data analyst.

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

If you would like more information about Big Data Training, please click the
orange "Request Info" button on top of this page.

If you are aspiring to be a data analyst then the core competencies that you
should be familiar with are distributed computing frameworks like Hadoop
and Spark, knowledge of programming languages like Python, R , SAS, data
munging, data visualization, math , statistics , and machine learning. When
being interviewed for a data analyst job role, candidates want to do
everything that can let the interviewer see their communication skills,
analytical skills and problem solving abilities. These data analyst interview
questions and answers will help newly minted data analyst job candidates
prepare for analyst –specific interview questions.

Interview Questions for Data Analysts

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

1) What is the difference between Data Mining and Data Analysis?

Data Mining vs Data Analysis

Data Mining Data Analysis

Data mining usually does not Data analysis begins with a question or an
require any hypothesis. assumption.
Data Mining depends on clean
Data analysis involves data cleaning.
and well-documented data.
Results of data mining are not Data analysts interpret the results and
always easy to interpret. convey the to the stakeholders.
Data mining algorithms Data analysts have to develop their own
automatically develop equations. equations based on the hypothesis.

For the complete list of big data companies and their salaries- CLICK HERE

2) Explain the typical data analysis process.

Data analysis deals with collecting, inspecting, cleansing, transforming and

modelling data to glean valuable insights and support better decision
making in an organization. The various steps involved in the data analysis
process include –

Data Exploration –

Having identified the business problem, a data analyst has to go through

the data provided by the client to analyse the root cause of the problem.

Data Preparation

This is the most crucial step of the data analysis process wherein any data
anomalies (like missing values or detecting outliers) with the data have to
be modelled in the right direction.

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Data Modelling

The modelling step begins once the data has been prepared. Modelling is
an iterative process wherein the model is run repeatedly for improvements.
Data modelling ensures that the best possible result is found for a given
business problem.

Validation

In this step, the model provided by the client and the model developed by
the data analyst are validated against each other to find out if the developed
model will meet the business requirements.

Implementation of the Model and Tracking

This is the final step of the data analysis process wherein the model is
implemented in production and is tested for accuracy and efficiency.

3) What is the difference between Data Mining and Data Profiling?

Data Profiling, also referred to as Data Archeology is the process of

assessing the data values in a given dataset for uniqueness, consistency
and logic. Data profiling cannot identify any incorrect or inaccurate data but
can detect only business rules violations or anomalies. The main purpose of
data profiling is to find out if the existing data can be used for various other
purposes.

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

Data Mining refers to the analysis of datasets to find relationships that have
not been discovered earlier. It focusses on sequenced discoveries or
identifying dependencies, bulk analysis, finding various types of attributes,
etc.

4) How often should you retrain a data model?

A good data analyst is the one who understands how changing business
dynamics will affect the efficiency of a predictive model. You must be a
valuable consultant who can use analytical skills and business acumen to
find the root cause of business problems.

The best way to answer this question would be to say that you would work
with the client to define a time period in advance. However, I would refresh
or retrain a model when the company enters a new market, consummate an
acquisition or is facing emerging competition. As a data analyst, I would
retrain the model as quick as possible to adjust with the changing behaviour
of customers or change in market conditions.

5) What is data cleansing? Mention few best practices that you have
followed while data cleansing.

From a given dataset for analysis, it is extremely important to sort the

information required for data analysis. Data cleaning is a crucial step in the
analysis process wherein data is inspected to find any anomalies, remove
repetitive data, eliminate any incorrect information, etc. Data cleansing does
not involve deleting any existing information from the database, it just
enhances the quality of data so that it can be used for analysis.

Some of the best practices for data cleansing include –

Developing a data quality plan to identify where maximum data quality

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errors occur so that you can assess the root cause and design the plan
according to that.
Follow a standard process of verifying the important data before it is
entered into the database.
Identify any duplicates and validate the accuracy of the data as this will
save lot of time during analysis.
Tracking all the cleaning operations performed on the data is very
important so that you repeat or remove any operations as necessary.

6) How will you handle the QA process when developing a predictive

model to forecast customer churn?

Data analysts require inputs from the business owners and a collaborative
environment to operationalize analytics. To create and deploy predictive
models in production there should be an effective, efficient and repeatable
process. Without taking feedback from the business owner, the model will
just be a one-and-done model.

The best way to answer this question would be to say that you would first
partition the data into 3 different sets Training, Testing and Validation. You
would then show the results of the validation set to the business owner by
eliminating biases from the first 2 sets. The input from the business owner
or the client will give you an idea on whether you model predicts customer
churn with accuracy and provides desired results.

7) Mention some common problems that data analysts encounter

during analysis.

Having a poor formatted data file. For instance, having CSV data with
un-escaped newlines and commas in columns.
Having inconsistent and incomplete data can be frustrating.
Common Misspelling and Duplicate entries are a common data quality
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problem that most of the data analysts face.

Having different value representations and misclassified data.

8) What are the important steps in data validation process?

Data Validation is performed in 2 different steps-

Data Screening – In this step various algorithms are used to screen the
entire data to find any erroneous or questionable values. Such values need
to be examined and should be handled.

Data Verification- In this step each suspect value is evaluated on case by

case basis and a decision is to be made if the values have to be accepted
as valid or if the values have to be rejected as invalid or if they have to be
replaced with some redundant values.

9) How will you create a classification to identify key customer trends

in unstructured data?

A model does not hold any value if it cannot produce actionable results, an
experienced data analyst will have a varying strategy based on the type of
data being analysed. For example, if a customer complain was retweeted
then should that data be included or not. Also, any sensitive data of the
customer needs to be protected, so it is also advisable to consult with the
stakeholder to ensure that you are following all the compliance regulations
of the organization and disclosure laws, if any.

You can answer this question by stating that you would first consult with the
stakeholder of the business to understand the objective of classifying this
data. Then, you would use an iterative process by pulling new data samples
and modifying the model accordingly and evaluating it for accuracy. You
can mention that you would follow a basic process of mapping the data,

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creating an algorithm, mining the data, visualizing it and so on. However,

you would accomplish this in multiple segments by considering the
feedback from stakeholders to ensure that you develop an enriching model
that can produce actionable results.

10) What is the criteria to say whether a developed data model is good
or not?

The developed model should have predictable performance.

A good data model can adapt easily to any changes in business
requirements.
Any major data changes in a good data model should be scalable.
A good data model is one that can be easily consumed for actionable
results.

11) According to you what are the qualities/skills that a data analyst
must posses to be successful at this position.

Problem Solving and Analytical thinking are the two important skills to be
successful as a data analyst. One needs to skilled ar formatting data so that
the gleaned information is available in a easy-to-read manner. Not to forget
technical proficiency is of significant importance. You can also talk about
other skills that the interviewer expects in an ideal candidate for the job
position based on the given job description.

12) You are assigned a new data anlytics project. How will
you begin with and what are the steps you will follow?

The purpose of asking this question is that the interviewer wants to

understand how you approach a given data problem and what is the though
process you follow to ensure that you are organized. You can start
answering this question by saying that you will start with finding the
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objective of the given problem and defining it so that there is solid direction
on what need to be done. The next step would be to do data exploration
and familiarise myself with the entire dataset which is very important when
working with a new dataset.The next step would be to prepare the data for
modelling which would including finding outliers, handling missing values
and validating the data. Having validated the data, I will start data modelling
untill I discover any meaningfuk insights. After this the final step would be to
implement the model and track the output results.

This is the generic data analysis process that we have explained in this
answer, however, the answer to your question might slightly change based
on the kind of data problem and the tools available at hand.

13) What do you know about interquartile range as data analyst?

A measure of the dispersion of data that is shown in a box plot is referred to

as the interquartile range. It is the difference between the upper and the
lower quartile.

Interview Questions Data Analyst based on various Skills

These are just some of the interview questions for a data analyst that are
likely to be asked in an analytic job interview. Apart from this there could be
several other interview questions asked around regression, correlation,
probability, statistics, design of experiments, questions on Python or R or
SAS programming , questions on distributed computing frameworks like
Hadoop or Spark, etc. With the help of industry experts at DeZyre , we have
formulated a list of analytic interview questions around statistics, python, r ,
hadoop and spark that will help you prepare for your next data analyst job
interview –

Data Analyst Interview Questions based on Probability and Statistics

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

Data Analyst Interview Questions based on R Programming

Data Analyst Interview Questions based on Python Programming

Data Analyst Interview Questions based on Hadoop

Data Analyst Interview Questions based on Spark

Puzzles Asked in Analytics Job Interviews

^. How much is the monthly purchase of Cigarette in India?

`. How many red cars are there in California?
a. There are two beakers –one with 4 litres and the other with 5 litres.
How will you pour exactly 7 litres of water in a bucket?
b. There are 3 switches on the ground floor of a building. Every switch
has a bulb corresponding to it. One bulb in on the ground floor, the
other on the 1st floor and the third bulb is on the second floor. You
cannot see any of the bulbs from the switchyard and neither are you
allowed to come back to the switchyard once you check the bulbs.
How will you find that which bulb is for which switch?
d. There are 3 jars, all of which are mislabelled. One jar contain Oranges,
the other contains Apples and the third jar contains a combination of
both Apples and Oranges. You can pick as many fruits as you want to
label the jars correctly. What is the minimum number of fruits that you
have to pick and from which jars to label the jars correctly?
e. Explain how would you estimate how many pairs of shoes could be sold
in New York city in each June.

Open Ended Data Analyst Interview Questions

^. What is your experience in using various Statistical analysis tools like

SAS or others if any?
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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

`. What is the most difficult data analysis problem that you have solved
till date? Why was it difficult than the other data analysis problems you
have solved?
a. You have a developed a data model but the user is having difficulty in
understanding on how the model works and what valuable insights it
can reveal. How will you explain the user so that he understand the
purpose of the model?
b. Name some data analysis tools that you have worked with.
d. Have you ever delivered a cost reducing solution?
e. Under what scenarios will you choose a simple model over a complex
one?
h. What have you done to improve your data analytics knowledge in the
past year?

Data Analyst Interview Questions asked at Top Tech Companies

1) How will you design a life for a 100 floor building? (Asked at Credit
Suisse)

2) How will you find the nth number from last in a single linked list? (Asked
at BlackRock)

3) How would you go about finding the differences between two sets of
data ? ( Asked at EY)

4) What is the angle between the hour and the minute hand at 3j15 ?
(Asked at EY)

If youʼve been through the data analyst interview process either as an

interviewer or as a candidate, what other data analyst interview
questions will you add to this list?

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

PREVIOUS NEXT

Telefonica Gains Real-Time Advantage With Big Data

Analytics.Forbes.com,December 5, 2016.

A leading telecommunications company Telefonica in Spain with 3 million

customers and more than 17 million mobile customers is making huge
profits from Big Data and Business Intelligence . With the help of Big Data
and Business Intelligence the company is now able to analyze the
preferences of its audience and improve customer satisfaction. With its big
data investments Telefonica now builds a customer recommendation profile

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

that gets updated every 24 hours and this result is fed to the real-time TV
environment.Telefonica Spain can now recommend personalized programs
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(Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2016/12/05/telefonica-gains-
real-time-advantage-with-big-data-analytics/#3f2b69ad4e31 )

If you would like more information about Big Data Training, please click the
orange "Request Info" button on top of this page.

How These Startups Plan to Use Big Data to Transform

Women's Health.Fortune.com, December 5,2016.

Companies like ColorGenomics are using genetic testing to identify

customerʼs risk of developing different types of cancers. The Vice president
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lot of different diseases. Glow has developed an app which allows to track
the menstrual cycles. She also says that they need more data related to
fertility. They are very much anxious to know what the app might do and
what they may be able to learn from the aggregated data.

(Source: http://fortune.com/2016/12/05/glow-color-genomics-big-data/)

For the complete list of big data companies and their salaries- CLICK HERE

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Journey Analytics: A Killer App for Big Data?.

Datanami.com, December 6,2016.

Journey Analytics , an application using big data and advanced analytic

technologies helps companies optimize customer interactions to predict
future behaviors.Journey Analytics has its own product category with no
less than 42 vendors creating tools which tackle various problems like
journey automation, journey testing, journey design and data fusion.

(Source: https://www.datanami.com/2016/12/06/journey-analytics-killer-
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Leveraging the Cloud for Big Data

Analytics.Healthcareitnews.com, December 13,2016.

A multinational manufacturer of medical devices and bioinformatics,

pharmaceutical and consumer health products is focussing prevention,
interception and cure for diseases by analysing big data in the cloud.
According to the CTO and Vice President of the company-data science is
making a transformational impact on health. The manufacturer has diverse
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(Source: http://www.healthcareitnews.com/sponsored-content/leveraging-
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Industry's Most Comprehensive Big Data Maturity Survey

Reveals Surprising State of Hadoop, Dramatic Rise of Big
Data in the Cloud.Yahoo.com,December 14,2016.

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

AtScale announced the results of 2016 Big data Maturity survey. The survey
was conducted in across 77 countries at 1,400 companies and more than
2,550 big data professionals participated in the survey.The survey reveals
an increasing surge in cloud deployments for big data. With more than 50%
of organizations already deploying big data in the cloud, the survey found
that 72% plan to deploy in future. One in five respondents to the survey are
using more than 100 nodes, of which 74% are in production.The survey also
revealed that BI is the number one workload for big data.2017 might be the
year of BI on big data as 75% respondents to the survey plan to use BI on
Big Data.

(Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/industrys-most-comprehensive-
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The Impact Of Big Data, Open Source On Oil And

Gas.epmag.com,December 28,2016.

The breeze of Open Source technologies combined with high pressure

wave from analytics has created a storm, which has transformed the whole
IT industry and the perspective with which we have been seeing the data.
There is no industry which not have been touched by open source
technology specifically Hadoop. The most recent being the Oil and Gas
Industry, which is the most critical, accident prone, and amalgamation of
varied technologies. This creates the native environment for Hadoop, as we
all know, the power lies in processing of all types of data. As the oil and gas

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

industry is growing at a very higher rate, the velocity of data has grown too
and the need to have a consolidated view of all the data sets from all sorts
of world, like legacy databases, sensors, IT, external sources, etc., has
pushed this industry to shift to open source analytics technologies like
Hadoop, which has helped them to identify potential failures 3 to 4 times
faster. Apart from this, using these technologies, companies are able to
monitor safety critical equipment deployed in offshore ships, encrypt
system data and transmit it, which are located in remote areas connected to
a very minimal network bandwidth in real time.

(Source: http://www.epmag.com/impact-big-data-open-source-oil-and-
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Big data analytics will help bridge India's tax

gap.Economictimes.com,December 28,2016.

The future of every country lies in their government and the people living in
that country. A major contribution in the countryʼs development is the
revenue generated from taxes. The world largest democratic country, India,
have the lowest tax revenue as a % of GDP within BRICS. If we estimate,
then only 4-5% of Indiaʼs total population pays tax. But, various policies like
Benami Property Act, demonetization, GST, Jan Dhan, and Aadhar, will help
revenue department in collecting data at a very high speed. But gathering
data alone will not help in providing a win-win environment for everyone
unless there is vision, a proper approach for making this data intelligent.
Emergence of new technologies like Big Data and Hadoop, and analytics will
help in co-locating all the data and generate insight from that data which in
turn will help the tax departments in distressing the malpractices like
circular trading, transfer pricing manipulations, hawala, sales under
declarations etc.

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Data Analyst Interview Questions to prepare for in 2018 11/21/18, 6(47 PM

(Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/big
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how/articleshow/56214309.cms)

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