60 Most Asked

Data Science

Interview Questions

Code-Based + Case-Based Questions Inside

 Easy Level

Q. 1 : What is Data Science?

Ans.: Data Science is an interdisciplinary field focused on
extracting knowledge and insights from data using
scientific methods, algorithms, and systems. It combines
aspects of statistics, computer science, and domain
expertise.

Q. 2 : What are the differences between supervised

and unsupervised learning?
Ans.: Supervised learning involves training a model on
labeled data, whereas unsupervised learning involves
training a model on data without labels to find hidden
patterns.

Q. 3 : What is the difference between overfitting

and underfitting?
Ans.: Overfitting occurs when a model learns the noise in
the training data, performing well on training data but
poorly on new data. Underfitting occurs when a model is
too simple to capture the underlying patterns in the data,
performing poorly on both training and new data.

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 Easy Level

Q. 4 : Explain the bias-variance tradeoff.

Ans.: The bias-variance tradeoff is the balance between
two sources of error that affect model performance. Bias
is the error due to overly simplistic models, while variance
is the error due to models being too complex. A good
model should find the right balance between bias and
variance.

Q. 5 : What is the difference between parametric

and non-parametric models?
Ans.: Parametric models assume a specific form for the
function that maps inputs to outputs and have a fixed
number of parameters. Non-parametric models do not
assume a specific form and can grow in complexity with
the data.

Q. 6 : What is cross-validation?
Ans.: Cross-validation is a technique for assessing how a
predictive model will generalize to an independent
dataset. It involves partitioning the data into subsets,
training the model on some subsets, and validating it on
the remaining subsets.

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 Easy Level

Q. 7 : What is a confusion matrix?

Ans.: A confusion matrix is a table used to evaluate the
performance of a classification model. It shows the
counts of true positives, true negatives, false positives,
and false negatives.

Q. 8 : What is regularization, and why is it useful?

Ans.: Regularization is a technique to prevent overfitting
by adding a penalty to the model's complexity. Common
types include L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization.

Q. 9 : What is the Central Limit Theorem?

Ans.: The Central Limit Theorem states that the
distribution of sample means approaches a normal
distribution as the sample size becomes large, regardless
of the original distribution of the data.

Q. 10 : What are precision and recall?

Ans.: Precision is the ratio of true positives to the sum of
true and false positives, while recall is the ratio of true
positives to the sum of true positives and false negatives.

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 Medium Level

Q. 11 : Explain the ROC curve and AUC.

Ans.: The ROC curve is a graphical representation of a
classifier's performance, plotting the true positive rate
against the false positive rate. AUC (Area Under the
Curve) measures the entire two-dimensional area
underneath the ROC curve.
Q. 12 : What is a p-value?
Ans.: A p-value measures the probability of obtaining test
results at least as extreme as the observed results,
assuming that the null hypothesis is true. It helps
determine the statistical significance of the results.
Q. 13 : What are the assumptions of linear
regression?
Ans.: Assumptions include linearity, independence,
homoscedasticity (constant variance), normality of
residuals, and no multicollinearity.
Q. 14 : What is multicollinearity, and how can it be
detected?
Ans.: Multicollinearity occurs when independent variables
in a regression model are highly correlated. It can be
detected using Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) or
correlation matrices.
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 Medium Level

Q. 15 : Explain the k-means clustering algorithm.

Ans.: K-means is an unsupervised learning algorithm that
partitions data into k clusters by minimizing the variance
within each cluster. It iteratively assigns data points to the
nearest centroid and updates centroids based on the
mean of the points in each cluster.

Q. 16 : What is a decision tree, and how does it

work?
Ans.: A decision tree is a flowchart-like structure used for
classification and regression. It splits data into subsets
based on the value of input features, creating branches
until a decision is made at the leaf nodes.

Q. 17 : How does the random forest algorithm work?

Ans.: Random forest is an ensemble learning method that
combines multiple decision trees to improve accuracy and
control overfitting. It uses bootstrap sampling and random
feature selection to build each tree.

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 Medium Level

Q. 18 : What is gradient boosting?

Ans.: Gradient boosting is an ensemble technique that
builds models sequentially, with each new model
attempting to correct the errors of the previous ones. It
combines weak learners to form a strong learner.

Q. 19 : Explain principal component analysis (PCA).

Ans.: PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that
transforms data into a new coordinate system by
projecting it onto principal components, which are
orthogonal and capture the maximum variance in the
data.

Q. 20 : What is the curse of dimensionality?

Ans.: The curse of dimensionality refers to the challenges
and issues that arise when analyzing and organizing data
in high-dimensional spaces. As the number of dimensions
increases, the volume of the space increases
exponentially, making data sparse and difficult to manage.

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 Hard Level

Q. 21 : Explain the difference between bagging and

boosting.
Ans.: Bagging (Bootstrap Aggregating) is an ensemble
method that trains multiple models independently using
different subsets of the training data and averages their
predictions. Boosting trains models sequentially, where
each model focuses on correcting the errors of the
previous ones.

Q. 22 : What is the difference between L1 and L2

regularization?
Ans.: L1 regularization (Lasso) adds the absolute value of
the coefficients as a penalty term, promoting sparsity. L2
regularization (Ridge) adds the squared value of the
coefficients as a penalty term, leading to smaller but non-
zero coefficients.

Q. 23 : What is the difference between a generative

and discriminative model?
Ans.: Generative models learn the joint probability
distribution of input features and output labels and can
generate new data points. Discriminative models learn the
conditional probability of the output labels given the input
features, focusing on the decision boundary.

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 Hard Level

Q. 24 : Explain the backpropagation algorithm in

neural networks.
Ans.: Backpropagation is an algorithm used to train neural
networks by calculating the gradient of the loss function
with respect to each weight and updating the weights in
the opposite direction of the gradient to minimize the
loss.

Q. 25 : What is the vanishing gradient problem?

Ans.: The vanishing gradient problem occurs when the
gradients used to update neural network weights become
very small, causing slow or stalled training. This is
common in deep networks with certain activation
functions like sigmoid or tanh.

Q. 26 : How do you handle imbalanced datasets?

Ans.: Techniques include resampling (oversampling the
minority class or undersampling the majority class), using
different evaluation metrics (e.g., precision-recall curve),
generating synthetic samples (e.g., SMOTE), and using
algorithms designed for imbalanced data.

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 Hard Level

Q. 27 : What is a convolutional neural network

(CNN)?
Ans.: CNN is a type of neural network designed for
processing structured grid data like images. It uses
convolutional layers to extract features and pooling layers
to reduce dimensionality, followed by fully connected
layers for classification.

Q. 28 : Explain recurrent neural networks (RNN) and

their variants.
Ans.: RNNs are neural networks designed for sequential
data, where connections between nodes form directed
cycles. Variants include Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)
and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), which address the
vanishing gradient problem and capture long-term
dependencies.

Q. 29 : What is a support vector machine (SVM)?

Ans.: SVM is a supervised learning algorithm used for
classification and regression. It finds the hyperplane that
best separates data points of different classes with the
maximum margin, and can handle non-linear data using
kernel functions.

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 Hard Level

Q. 30 : Explain the Expectation-Maximization (EM)

algorithm.
Ans.: EM is an iterative algorithm used to find maximum
likelihood estimates of parameters in probabilistic models
with latent variables. It consists of two steps: Expectation
(E-step) to estimate the expected value of the latent
variables, and Maximization (M-step) to maximize the
likelihood function with respect to the parameters.

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 31 : Write a Python function to calculate the

mean and variance of a list of numbers.
Ans.:

Q. 32 : Implement k-means clustering from scratch

in Python.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 33 : Write a Python function to implement

logistic regression using gradient descent.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 34 : Write a Python function to perform PCA on a

given dataset.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 35 : Implement a decision tree classifier from

scratch in Python.
Ans.:

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Practical Code-Based Questions

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Practical Code-Based Questions

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 36 : Implement a neural network from scratch in

Python.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 37 : Write a Python function to calculate the F1

score.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 38 : Implement the k-nearest neighbors (k-NN)

algorithm from scratch in Python.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 39 : Implement the Naive Bayes classifier from

scratch in Python.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 40 : Implement the Apriori algorithm for

association rule mining in Python.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 41 : Write a Python function to perform

hierarchical clustering.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 42 : Implement a Python function to calculate the

silhouette score for clustering evaluation.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 43 : Implement a Python function to perform a

grid search for hyperparameter tuning.
Ans.:

Q. 44 : Write a Python function to implement the

cross-entropy loss function.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 45 : Implement a Python function to calculate the

Matthews correlation coefficient.
Ans.:

Q. 46 : Write a Python function to implement the k-

means++ initialization.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 47 : Implement a Python function to calculate the

entropy of a dataset.
Ans.:

Q. 48 : Implement the Markov Chain Monte Carlo

(MCMC) method in Python.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 49 : Write a Python function to implement the

Levenshtein distance algorithm.
Ans.:

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 Practical Code-Based Questions

Q. 50 : Write a Python function to implement the

Viterbi algorithm for hidden Markov models.
Ans.:

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 case-based questions

Case 1 : Customer Churn Prediction

Question :
You are provided with customer data for a telecom
company, including demographic information, service
usage, and whether the customer has churned or not.
How would you build a model to predict customer
churn?
Answer/Approach:
‘ Data Exploration: Understand the data, check for
missing values, and explore patternss
o‘ Feature Engineering: Create relevant features like
usage patterns, duration of service, and interaction
with supports
w‘ Model Selection: Use models like logistic regression,
decision trees, or ensemble methods like random
forests or XGBoosts
d‘ Evaluation: Use metrics like accuracy, precision, recall,
and AUC-ROCs
‡‘ Deployment: Implement the model in a production
environment and monitor performance.

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 case-based questions

Case 2 : A/B Testing

Question :
An e-commerce company wants to test a new
recommendation algorithm. How would you design an
A/B test to measure its effectiveness?
Answer/Approach:
¢Ž Hypothesis Definition: Clearly state the null and
alternative hypothesesu
‘Ž Sample Size Calculation: Determine the required
sample size to achieve statistical significanceu
šŽ Randomization: Randomly assign users to the control
(current algorithm) and treatment (new algorithm)
groupsu
cŽ Metrics: Define success metrics such as click-through
rate, conversion rate, and average order valueu
„Ž Analysis: Use statistical tests to compare the
performance of both groupsu
^Ž Conclusion: Draw conclusions based on the results
and make recommendations.

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 case-based questions

Case 3 : Fraud Detection

Question :
You are tasked with detecting fraudulent transactions
for a credit card company. How would you approach
this problem?
Answer/Approach:
• Data Understanding: Analyze transaction data to
identify patterns indicative of fraudo
q Feature Engineering: Create features such as
transaction amount, frequency, location, and time of
dayo
i Modeling: Use supervised learning models like logistic
regression, decision trees, and anomaly detection
methods like isolation forestso
` Evaluation: Evaluate using metrics like precision,
recall, F1 score, and confusion matrixo
‡ Monitoring: Continuously monitor model performance
and update the model as fraud patterns evolve.

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 case-based questions

Case 4 : Sales Forecasting

Question :
A retail company wants to forecast sales for the next
quarter. How would you approach this task?
Answer/Approach:
q Data Collection: Gather historical sales data, including
seasonal trends and external factors like holidayst
“q Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Identify patterns,
trends, and anomalies in the datat
iq Feature Engineering: Create features such as moving
averages, lagged values, and external indicatorst
eq Model Selection: Use time series models like ARIMA,
exponential smoothing, or machine learning models
like random forests and gradient boostingt
q Evaluation: Validate model performance using metrics
like RMSE, MAE, and MAPEt
]q Forecasting: Generate forecasts and provide
actionable insights.

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 case-based questions

Case 5 : Recommender Systems

Question :
You need to build a recommendation system for an
online streaming service. How would you approach it?
Answer/Approach:
¦ Data Understanding: Analyze user behavior data,
including watch history, ratings, and preferencesv
‰ Collaborative Filtering: Implement user-based or item-
based collaborative filteringv
l Content-Based Filtering: Use metadata like genre,
actors, and directors to recommend similar contentv
h Hybrid Approach: Combine collaborative and content-
based filtering for better recommendationsv
– Evaluation: Use metrics like precision, recall, and mean
reciprocal rank (MRR) to evaluate the recommender
systemv
_ Personalization: Continuously update the model
based on user interactions to improve
recommendations.

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 case-based questions

Case 6 : Sentiment Analysis

Question :
A company wants to analyze customer reviews to
understand their sentiments about its new product.
How would you proceed?
Answer/Approach:
¨x Data Collection: Gather customer reviews from various
sources like social media, websites, and surveys{
x Preprocessing: Clean and preprocess the text data,
including tokenization, stop-word removal, and
stemming/lemmatization{
px Feature Extraction: Use techniques like TF-IDF, word
embeddings, or BERT for feature extraction{
bx Modeling: Use machine learning models like logistic
regression, SVM, or deep learning models like LSTM
and BERT{
›x Evaluation: Evaluate model performance using metrics
like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score{
[x Insights: Analyze the results to provide actionable
insights to the company.

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 case-based questions

Case 7 : Anomaly Detection

Question :
You are provided with server logs and need to detect
anomalies in server performance. How would you
approach this problem?
Answer/Approach:
˜ Data Understanding: Analyze the server logs to
identify normal and abnormal behavior patternsr
p˜ Feature Engineering: Create features like CPU usage,
memory usage, request count, and error ratesr
g˜ Modeling: Use unsupervised learning methods like
clustering (e.g., DBSCAN), isolation forests, or
autoencoders for anomaly detectionr
a˜ Evaluation: Validate the model using techniques like
ROC curve and precision-recall curvesr
˜ Deployment: Implement the model in a monitoring
system to detect anomalies in real-time and alert the
relevant teams.

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 case-based questions

Case 8 : Image Classification

Question :
A healthcare company needs to classify X-ray images
to detect pneumonia. How would you approach this
problem?
Answer/Approach:
§€ Data Collection: Gather a dataset of labeled X-ray
imagesƒ
›€ Preprocessing: Preprocess the images by resizing,
normalization, and augmentation to increase the
dataset sizeƒ
x€ Model Selection: Use convolutional neural networks
(CNN) architectures like ResNet, VGG, or transfer
learning modelsƒ
i€ Training: Train the model using cross-validation to
avoid overfittingƒ
˜€ Evaluation: Use metrics like accuracy, precision, recall,
F1 score, and AUC-ROCƒ
b€ Deployment: Implement the model in a clinical setting,
ensuring it integrates with existing systems and
provides explainable results.
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 case-based questions

Case 9 : Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Question :
A customer support system needs to automatically
categorize incoming support tickets. How would you
approach this problem?
Answer/Approach:
«‰ Data Collection: Gather a dataset of historical support
tickets and their categoriesŒ
‰ Preprocessing: Clean and preprocess the text data,
including tokenization, stop-word removal, and
stemming/lemmatizationŒ
v‰ Feature Extraction: Use techniques like TF-IDF, word
embeddings, or BERT for feature extractionŒ
i‰ Modeling: Use classification models like logistic
regression, SVM, or deep learning models like LSTM
and BERTŒ
œ‰ Evaluation: Evaluate model performance using metrics
like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scoreŒ
b‰ Deployment: Integrate the model into the support
system to automatically categorize new tickets and
continuously improve based on user feedback.
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 case-based questions

Case 10 : Market Basket Analysis

Question :
A grocery store wants to analyze customer purchase
patterns to increase sales. How would you approach
this problem?
Answer/Approach:
œo Data Collection: Gather transaction data, including
items purchased and transaction timestampsr
’o Preprocessing: Clean the data, removing any
inconsistencies or missing valuesr
uo Association Rule Mining: Use algorithms like Apriori or
FP-Growth to find frequent itemsets and generate
association rulesr
bo Evaluation: Evaluate the rules using metrics like
support, confidence, and liftr
o Insights: Analyze the results to identify patterns and
provide recommendations to increase cross-selling
and up-sellingr
_o Implementation: Implement changes in the store
layout, promotions, and marketing strategies based on
the insights.
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