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Bosch Automotive Service Solutions, Llc Interview Questions

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Machine Learning

Interpret coefficients of logistic regression for categorical and boolean variables

Coefficients of Logistic Regression

How would we build a model to detect fraud and text customers to approve or deny fraudulent transactions

Bank Fraud Model

Rebalancing outcome probabilities for a classifier on imbalanced data.

Rebalance Probabilities

Lasso vs Ridge

What are some machine learning methods for building this system

FAQ Matching

Data Structures & Algorithms

Given an integer N, write a function that returns all of the prime numbers up to N

Prime to N

Given an array and a target integer, write a function that returns the indices of two integers in the array that add up to the target integer.

Target Indices

This problem involves identifying duplicate numbers in a list of integers. The function should return a list of the duplicate numbers.

Find Duplicate Numbers in a List

Write a function digit_accumulator that returns the sum of every digit in a string

Digit Accumulator

Write a function that tests whether a string of brackets is balanced.

The Brackets Problem

Product Sense & Metrics

What would you investigate to diagnose what's happening?

WAU vs Open Rates

What’s the expected churn rate in March for all customers that bought the product since January 1st?

Expected Churn

Google Maps Improvement

Unified Inbox

What are the top five metrics you would start tracking to understand the health of Google Docs

Docs Metrics

Behavioral

Describing a data project and its challenges

Hurdles In Data Projects

Strategically resolving misaligned expectations with stakeholders for a successful project outcome

Stakeholder Communication

Prioritized debt reduction, process improvement, and a focus on maintainability for fintech efficiency

Decreasing Tech Debt

How would you answer when an Interviewer asks why you applied to their company?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us

Making data-driven insights actionable for those without technical expertise

Simple Explanations

Analytics

How would you present the performance of each subscription to an executive?

Analyzing Churn Behavior

Let’s say that you're in charge of an e-commerce D2C business that sells socks. What business health metrics would you care?

D2C Socks e-Commerce

Which metric should we use for late orders if the distribution is right-skewed and what does that tell us?

Late Orders

Let's say you work at Facebook and you're analyzing churn on the platform.

Retention Rate Disparity

Describing a real-world data cleaning and organization project

Data Cleaning Experiences

Tell me about a data project that didn’t go the way you expected. What did you set out to do, what surprised you, and how did you handle it?

Given an integer <code>N</code>, write a function that returns a list of all of the prime numbers up to <code>N</code>.

Note: Return an empty list there are no prime numbers less than or equal to <code>N</code>.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>N = 3
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def prime_numbers(N) -&gt; [2,3]
</code></pre>

Let’s say we’re comparing two machine learning algorithms. In which case would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm? 

Give an example of the tradeoffs between the two.

In machine learning, when would you use a bagging algorithm over a boosting algorithm?

In machine learning, when would you use a bagging algorithm over a boosting algorithm?

Bagging vs. Boosting

In which case would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm

Bagging vs Boosting

You’re given a string that may contain the characters <code>{</code>, <code>}</code>, <code>[</code>, <code>]</code>, <code>(</code>, and <code>)</code>.

Task: Verify that the string is balanced. A balanced string is one where every opening character, <code>{</code>, <code>[</code>, or <code>(</code>, has a corresponding closing character, <code>}</code>, <code>]</code>, or <code>)</code>.

Write a function called <code>is_balanced(string: str) -&gt; bool</code> which verifies the balance of a string.

Example:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>is_balanced(&#39;(())[]{}&#39;) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>is_balanced(&#39;{([(){}])()}&#39;) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>is_balanced(&#39;{}[]())&#39;) -&gt; False
</code></pre>

<hr/>

Let’s say that you work at a bank that wants to build a model to detect fraud on the platform.

The bank wants to implement a text messaging service in addition that will text customers when the model detects a fraudulent transaction in order for the customer to approve or deny the transaction with a text response.

How would we build this model?

Let’s say that you work at a bank that wants to build a model to detect fraud on the platform.

The bank wants to implement a text messaging service that will text customers when the model detects a fraudulent transaction in order for the customer to approve or deny the transaction with a text response.

Which statement is true?

Let's say that you work at a bank that wants to build a model to detect fraud on the platform.

The bank wants to implement a text messaging service that will text customers when the model detects a fraudulent transaction in order for the customer to approve or deny the transaction with a text response.

Which statement is true?

Let’s say you work in air traffic control. You are given the table below containing information on flights between two cities.

Write a query to find out how much time, in minutes (rounded down), each plane spent in the air each day.

Note: Both cities are in the same time zone, so you do not need to worry about converting time zones.

<code>flights</code> table

Example:

Input:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Columns</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>destination_location</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>source_location</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>plane_id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>flight_start</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>flight_end</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Output:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Columns</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>plane_id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>calendar_day</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>time_in_min</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Please give <code>calendar_day</code> in the format <code>YYYY-MM-DD</code>

Write a query to find how much time each plane spent in the air each day in minutes rounded down

Total Time in Flight

Say you are tasked with designing a data mart or data warehouse for a new online retailer.

How would you design the system?

Note: Sketch a star schema to explain your design.

Design a data warehouse for a new online retailer

Retailer Data Warehouse

Data Modeling

Let’s say that you’re a data scientist on the engagement team. A product manager comes up to you and says that the weekly active users metric is up 5% but email notification open rates are down 2%.

What would you investigate to diagnose what’s happening?

Email Open Rate

You work at a ride-sharing company and are given a table containing information about the rides of users.

Write a query to get the duration (in minutes) of each ride longer than two hours. Sort the results by duration in descending order.

<code>rides</code> table:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Columns</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>passenger_user_id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>start_dt</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>end_dt</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>distance</code></td>
<td>FLOAT</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>ride_region</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>is_completed</code>	</td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Output:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column	</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>duration_minutes</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Write a query to get the duration in minutes of each ride longer than two hours, sorted descending

Time Difference

Let’s say that you’re the PM on Google Maps.

<ol>
<li>How would you improve Google Maps?</li>

<li>What metrics would you check to see if your feature improvements are successful?</li>
</ol>

You are given a binary tree of unique positive numbers. Each node in the binary tree is represented as a dictionary with the following keys:

<ul>
<li><code>data</code>: integer value stored in the node</li>
<li><code>left</code>: reference to the left child (or <code>None</code>)</li>
<li><code>right</code>: reference to the right child (or <code>None</code>)</li>
</ul>

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>node = {
 &#34;data&#34;: 6,
 &#34;left&#34;: {
 &#34;data&#34;: 3,
 &#34;left&#34;: {...},
 &#34;right&#34;: {...}
 },
 &#34;right&#34;: {
 &#34;data&#34;: 9,
 &#34;left&#34;: {...},
 &#34;right&#34;: {...}
 }
}
</code></pre>

Given two node values as input (<code>value1</code> and <code>value2</code>), write a function to return the value of the nearest common ancestor (lowest node in the tree that has both nodes as descendants).

Note: If one of the nodes doesn’t exist in the tree, return <code>-1</code>.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code># Diagram of the binary tree
&#39;&#39;&#39;
 6 
 / \ 
 3 9 
 / \
 2 11
 / \
 5 8
&#39;&#39;&#39;
value1 = 8
value2 = 2
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>common_ancestor(root,value1,value2) -&gt; 3
</code></pre>

Explanation:

<ul>
<li>Ancestors of <code>8</code>: <code>11 → 3 → 6</code></li>
<li>Ancestors of <code>2</code>: <code>3 → 6</code></li>
<li>Common ancestors: <code>3</code> and <code>6</code></li>
<li>The nearest common ancestor is <code>3</code>.</li>
</ul>

Write a function to return the value of the nearest node that is a parent to both nodes.

Nearest Common Ancestor

What is the difference between covariance and correlation? Provide an example.

Explain the difference between covariance and correlation and provide an example

Covariance vs Correlation

Statistics

How does random forest generate the forest? Additionally, why would we use it over other algorithms such as logistic regression?

What happens when you average the output on multiple decision trees?

What happens when you average the output on multiple decision trees?

Average Trees

How does random forest generate the forest and why use it over logistic regression

Random Forest Explanation

Given a list of integers, identify all the duplicate values in the list. Assume that the list can contain both positive and negative numbers, and the order of the list does not matter. A number is considered a duplicate if it appears more than once in the list. Return a list of the duplicate numbers.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; [1, 2, 3]
</code></pre>

The numbers 1, 2, and 3 all appear more than once in the list, so they are considered duplicates.

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, -1, 2, 3, 3, -1]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; [-1, 3]
</code></pre>

The numbers -1 and 3 both appear more than once in the list, so they are considered duplicates. Note that the order of the output does not matter.

Example 3:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; []
</code></pre>

None of the numbers in the list appear more than once, so there are no duplicates.

Suppose there exists a new airline named Jetco that flies domestically across North America. Jetco recently had a study commissioned that tested the boarding time of every airline, and it came out that Jetco had the fastest average boarding times of any airline.

What factors could have biased this result, and what would you look into?

What could potentially bias the average boarding time in favor of an airline that only flies domestically?

What could potentially bias the average boarding time in favor of an airline that only flies domestically?

Boarding Times Bias

A new airline came out as the fastest average boarding times compared to other airlines.  What factors could have biased this result and what would you look into?

Say you work for an e-commerce website that receives clickstream data from Kafka on a daily basis. You’re asked to design a data analytics solution for storing and querying raw data, with a two-year retention period.

The current data volume is around 600 million events daily.

What kind of data analytics solution would you design, keeping costs in mind?

Design a cost-conscious analytics solution to store and query daily Kafka clickstream data with two-year retention

Clickstream Data

Given an array and a target integer, write a function <code>sum_pair_indices</code> that returns the indices of two integers in the array that add up to the target integer. If not found, just return an empty list.

Note: Can you do it on \(O(n)\) time?

Note: Even though there could be many solutions, only one needs to be returned.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>array = [1 2 3 4] 
target = 5 
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def sum_pair_indices(array, target) -&gt; [0 3] or [1 2]
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>array = [3]
target = 6 
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>Do NOT return [0 0] as you can&#39;t use an index twice.
</code></pre>

What’s the difference between Lasso and Ridge Regression?

Under what circumstances is it recommended to use Lasso regression over Ridge regression?

Under what circumstances is it recommended to use Lasso regression over Ridge regression?

Given a table of <code>cars</code> with columns <code>id</code> and <code>make</code>, write a query that outputs a random manufacturer’s name with an equal probability of selecting any name.

Input:

<code>cars</code> table

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th><code>id</code></th>
<th><code>make</code></th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>Ford</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>2</td>
<td>Toyota</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>Toyota</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>Honda</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>5</td>
<td>Honda</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>6</td>
<td>Honda</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Output:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>make</code></td>
<td>Text</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Write a query that outputs a random manufacturer's name with an equal probability of selecting any name.

Uniform Car Maker

Given a <code>users</code> table, write a query to return only its duplicate rows.

Example:

Input:

<code>users</code> table

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>created_at</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Duplicate Rows

How would you interpret coefficients of logistic regression for categorical and boolean variables?

Why is one-hot encoding recommended for categorical variables in logistic regression models?

Why is one-hot encoding recommended for categorical variables in logistic regression models?

You’re a data scientist at YouTube. Leadership wants to revisit how the platform measures success, not for a specific new feature, but for the product as a whole given its current state.

How would you define and measure success for YouTube? Identify your primary and secondary metrics, explain your rationale for each, and discuss how you would choose the right thresholds for any engagement-based metrics you propose.

The role of A/B testing in measuring the success rate of an analytics experiment

Success Measurement

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, usually starting with 0 and 1. It is often used in algorithm examples, and is defined by the following formula: F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), with F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1.

Your task is to implement the Fibonacci algorithm in three different methods:
1. Recursively
2. Iteratively
3. Using Memoization

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>n = 5
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>fibonacci(n) -&gt; 5
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>n = 10
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>fibonacci(n) -&gt; 55
</code></pre>

The Fibonacci sequence starts as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

This question requires the implementation of the Fibonacci sequence using three different methods: recursively, iteratively, and using memoization.

Implementing the Fibonacci Sequence in Three Different Methods

You’re AI engineer working on an energy forecasting system at Siemens that helps utilities predict short-term electricity demand to balance grid load and reduce outages. You train a recurrent neural network on long historical time series (weather, calendar effects, local demand signals) to forecast energy demand.

Early in training, the model appears to learn normally, but after several epochs the loss becomes highly unstable, oscillating wildly before turning into NaNs. At the same time, training slows dramatically and the model fails to recover even after restarting from recent checkpoints.

You’ve verified that the data pipeline is correct and labels are well-aligned with inputs. No changes were made to the dataset, but increasing the sequence length or learning rate makes the problem significantly worse.

How would you investigate the cause of this training instability? What signals would you look for during debugging, and how would those findings guide the changes you make to the model or training setup?

How would you investigate the cause of this training instability?

Training Instability in Neural Networks

Given a string, write a function to determine if it is palindrome or not.

Note: A palindrome is a word/string that is read the same way forward as it is backward, e.g. <code>&#39;reviver&#39;</code>, <code>&#39;madam&#39;</code>, <code>&#39;deified&#39;</code> and <code>&#39;civic&#39;</code> are all palindromes, while <code>&#39;tree&#39;</code>, <code>&#39;music&#39;</code> and <code>&#39;person&#39;</code> are not palindromes.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>word1 = &#34;tree&#34;
word2 = &#34;radar&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def is_palindrome(word1) -&gt; False
def is_palindrome(word2) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

Given a string, write a function to determine if it is palindrome or not.

String Palindromes

You are given a <code>string</code> that represents some floating-point number. Write a function, <code>digit_accumulator</code>, that returns the sum of every digit in the <code>string</code>.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>s = &#34;123.0045&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def digit_accumulator(s) -&gt; 15

Since 
1 + 2 + 3 + 0 + 0 + 4 + 5 = 15
</code></pre>

Let’s say that we want to build a chatbot system for frequently asked questions. Whenever a user writes a question, we want to return the closest answer from a list of FAQs.

What are some machine learning methods for building this system?

Let’s say that you’re in charge of Square’s small business division. 

The CEO wants to hire a customer success manager to help manage a new software product. Another executive thinks that it’s worth just instituting a free trial instead.

What would be your recommendation on utilizing a customer success manager versus just a free trial to get new or existing customers to use the new product?

What would be your recommendation on utilizing a customer success manager versus just a free trial to get new or existing customers to use the new product

Customer Success vs. Free Trial

Business Case

What are the key differences between classification models and regression models?

What is the MOST important difference between regression and classification models?

What is the MOST important difference between regression and classification models?

Classification vs Regression

Explain the key differences between classification models and regression models

Classification and Regression

You’re a data analyst at a global CPG distributor that tracks daily stock availability across ~80 countries for the brands in its portfolio. The operations team wants to triage which brands are exposed to systemic supply-chain risk, which have only localized issues, and which are running clean so they know where to spend investigative cycles.

You have access to a daily inventory table:

<code>inventory_status</code>

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column</th>
<th>Type</th>
<th>Description</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>date</code></td>
<td>DATE</td>
<td>The day the snapshot was taken</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>country</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
<td>ISO country code where stock is held</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>company</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
<td>Brand in the portfolio</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>product</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
<td>SKU identifier</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>is_out_of_stock</code></td>
<td>BOOLEAN</td>
<td><code>TRUE</code> if the SKU was out of stock at any point that day in that country</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Over the trailing 30 days, every company in the portfolio falls into one of three buckets:

<ol>
<li>Resilient — no stock-outs anywhere.</li>
<li>Localized risk — stock-outs occurred, but only ever within a single country.</li>
<li>Systemic risk — stock-outs occurred across multiple countries.</li>
</ol>

Given this bucket distribution, propose three business hypotheses the operations team should investigate to act on these results. For each hypothesis:

<ul>
<li>State the mechanism you think is driving the pattern.</li>
<li>Describe the follow-up analysis that would confirm or kill it.</li>
</ul>

Classify companies as resilient, localized, or systemic stock-out risk, then propose three falsifiable hypotheses explaining the distribution

Calculate Moving Average	SQL	Easy
Predict Customer Churn	Machine Learning	Medium
A/B Test Significance	Statistics	Medium
Optimize Query Performance	SQL	Hard
Feature Importance Analysis	Machine Learning	Medium
Clean Missing Data	Python	Easy
Neural Network Architecture	Deep Learning	Hard
Calculate Cohort Retention	SQL	Medium
Bayesian Probability	Statistics	Easy
Recommend Similar Products	Machine Learning	Hard

Bosch Automotive Service Solutions, Llc Interview Questions

Bosch Automotive Service Solutions, Llc Interview Guides

Bosch Automotive Service Solutions, Llc Interview Questions

Challenge

Discussion & Interview Experiences

Discussion & Interview Experiences