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Data Scientist Interviews

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Data Scientist Interview Questions

In a data scientist interview, expect employers to ask questions that assess your data modeling, problem-solving, and programming skills. Be prepared to answer general questions that test your knowledge of statistics and data science. You should also be ready to answer open-ended questions that test your creativity, communication skills, and formal education in data modeling and programming.

Top Data Scientist Interview Questions & How to Answer

Question 1

Question #1: Which data modeling techniques do you prefer and why?

How to answer
How to answer: Turning data into understandable and actionable information is a critical part of the data scientist's job. This question allows employers to understand your data modeling skills and background. List and discuss your preferred data modeling techniques, including benefits such as ease of use, flexibility, etc.
Question 2

Question #2: How would you detect bogus Instagram accounts used for scamming consumers?

How to answer
How to answer: Questions like this one allow an employer to test your problem-solving skills. When answering open-ended questions such as these, feel free to ask clarifying questions and use whiteboards to demonstrate your coding and diagramming skills. Share your thought process as you work through the problem.
Question 3

Question #3: Describe circumstances that require a list, tuple, or set in Python.

How to answer
How to answer: Interviewers will use questions such as this one to test your Python programming skills. Review Python basics such as lists, tuples, and sets before your interview. You should be able to explain when and how each tool is used by data scientists.

54,212 data scientist interview questions shared by candidates

They asked a lot of questions about my take-home project; in particular wanted to know about the reasons that I took the approach that I did. I could tell they were coming more from a statistical and economics background for the most part; while I'm more of an engineering and machine-learning hacker type standpoint. They also had a lot of "ambiguous" questions; by that, I mean questions about ambiguous business situations I might encounter in this position. Wanted to know how well I would do with ambiguous questions I might get from business leaders.
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Data Scientist

Interviewed at Pluralsight

2.9★
Mar 5, 2017

They asked a lot of questions about my take-home project; in particular wanted to know about the reasons that I took the approach that I did. I could tell they were coming more from a statistical and economics background for the most part; while I'm more of an engineering and machine-learning hacker type standpoint. They also had a lot of "ambiguous" questions; by that, I mean questions about ambiguous business situations I might encounter in this position. Wanted to know how well I would do with ambiguous questions I might get from business leaders.

Given an array of sorted numbers ex: [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3] find the indices where a single number starts and ends (ex: 1, start index=0, end_index=2). You have to solve this in log(n) complexity, you cannot go through every sample (n complexity).
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Research Scientist

Interviewed at Meta

3.6★
Apr 18, 2019

Given an array of sorted numbers ex: [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3] find the indices where a single number starts and ends (ex: 1, start index=0, end_index=2). You have to solve this in log(n) complexity, you cannot go through every sample (n complexity).

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