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Data Structures & Algorithms

Given two sorted lists, write a function to merge them into one sorted list.

Merge Sorted Lists

Find Bigrams

Write a function to create a single dataframe with complete addresses in the format of street, city, state, zip code.

Complete Addresses

Write a function friendship_timeline to generate an output that lists the pairs of friends with their corresponding timestamps of the friendship beginning and then the timestamp of the friendship ending. 

Friendship Timeline

Write a function n_frequent_words that returns the top N frequent words and their frequencies, and state its run-time

Get Top N Frequent Words

Select the 2nd highest salary in the engineering department

2nd Highest Salary

Write a SQL query to create a histogram of the number of comments per user in the month of January 2020.

Comments Histogram

Write a query that returns all neighborhoods that have 0 users.

Empty Neighborhoods

Calculate the first touch attribution for each `user_id` that converted.

First Touch Attribution

Write a query to return the two students with the closest test scores and the score difference

Closest SAT Scores

Machine Learning

How would you encode a categorical variable with thousands of distinct values

Encoding Categorical Features

Interpret coefficients of logistic regression for categorical and boolean variables

Coefficients of Logistic Regression

Which model would perform better and why?

Booking Regression

How would you build a job recommendation feed?

Job Recommendation

Write a function calculate_rmse to calculate the root mean squared error from y_pred and y_true

RMS Error

Probability

What is the probability that each subsequent card is larger than the previous drawn card when picking three cards from a shuffled deck of 500 cards

500 Cards

First to Six

What is the probability that it's actually raining in Seattle?

Raining in Seattle

What is the probability that item X would be found on Amazon's website?

Found Item

Compute the expected number of good ads in each scenario and the probability a bad rating came from a lazy rater

Ad Raters

Product Sense & Metrics

How can we measure the success of a 30-day free trial in acquiring and retaining new Netflix users

Netflix Retention

How would you measure the success of Facebook Groups

Group Success

How would you verify the claim that Facebook is losing young users and what test metrics would you look at

Losing Users

What would you investigate to diagnose what's happening?

WAU vs Open Rates

How would you measure the success of the Instagram TV product

Instagram TV Success

Write a SQL query to select the 2nd highest salary in the engineering department.

Note: If more than one person shares the highest salary, the query should select the next highest salary.

Example:

Input:

<code>employees</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>first_name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>last_name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>salary</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>department_id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<code>departments</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>
</tbody>
</table>
Output:

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

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

Amy and Brad take turns in rolling a fair six-sided die. Whoever rolls a “6” first wins the game. Amy starts by rolling first.

What’s the probability that Amy wins?

Amy and Brad take turns in rolling a fair six-sided die. Whoever rolls a “6” first wins the game. Amy starts by rolling first.

What’s the probability that Amy wins?

Imagine a deck of 500 cards numbered from 1 to 500. If all the cards are shuffled randomly and you are asked to pick three cards, one at a time, what’s the probability of each subsequent card being larger than the previous drawn card?

Imagine a deck of 2000 cards numbered from 1 to 2000. If all the cards are shuffled randomly and you are asked to pick three cards, one at a time, what’s the probability of each subsequent card being larger than the previously drawn card?

Imagine a deck of 2000 cards numbered from 1 to 2000. If all the cards are shuffled randomly and you are asked to pick three cards, one at a time, what's the probability of each subsequent card being larger than the previously drawn card?

2000 cards

You are about to get on a plane to Seattle. You want to know if you should bring an umbrella. You call 3 random friends of yours who live there and ask each independently if it’s raining. Each of your friends has a 2⁄3 chance of telling you the truth and a 1⁄3 chance of messing with you by lying. All 3 friends tell you that “Yes” it is raining.

What is the probability that it’s actually raining in Seattle?

What is the main difference between the Frequentist and Bayesian methods of probabilistic analysis?

What is the **main** difference between the Frequentist and Bayesian methods of probabilistic analysis?

Frequentist Vs Bayesian Analysis

Let’s say we have a very naive advertising platform. There is an audience of size A and a limited amount of impressions B.

Each of the impressions goes to just one user, defined at random. Every user in the audience has the same random chance of receiving each impression. 

<ol>
<li>Compute the probability that a user has exactly 0 impressions. </li>

<li>What’s the probability that every person has at least 1 impression?</li>
</ol>

Compute the probability a user gets exactly 0 impressions, and the probability everyone gets at least 1 impression

Impression Reach

Netflix has hired people to rate movies.

Out of all of the raters, 80% of the raters carefully rate movies and rate 60% of the movies as good and 40% as bad. The other 20% are lazy raters and rate 100% of the movies as good.

Assuming all raters rate the same amount of movies, what is the probability that a movie is rated good?

There are two categories of movie raters: careful and lazy. Careful raters make up 80% of the total. They rate 60% of the movies as good and 40% as bad. Lazy raters, constitute 20% of the raters and 100% of the movies as good. Given these parameters, calculate the overall probability of a movie being rated good.

There are two categories of movie raters: careful and lazy. Careful raters make up 80% of the total. They rate 60% of the movies as good and 40% as bad. Lazy raters, constitute 20% of the raters and 100% of the movies as good. Given these parameters, calculate the overall probability of a movie being rated good.

Lazy Raters

What is the probability that a movie is rated good

Let’s say at Netflix we offer a subscription where customers can enroll for a 30-day free trial. After 30 days, customers will be automatically charged based on the package selected.

Let’s say we want to measure the success of acquiring new users through the free trial.

How can we measure acquisition success and what metrics can we use to measure the success of the free trial?

Let’s say we want to measure the effectiveness of Netflix’s 30-day free trial plan.

What is NOT a metric we would use?

Let's say we want to measure the effectiveness of Netflix's 30-day free trial plan.

What is NOT a metric we would use?

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

Let’s say you’re a Product Data Scientist at Instagram. How would you measure the success of the Instagram TV product?

What is the primary goal of Instagram TV as a product feature?

What is the primary goal of Instagram TV as a product feature?

How would you measure the success of Facebook Groups?

Considering the purpose of Facebook Groups as a platform for connecting users through shared interests or real-life relationships, which metrics would be appropriate to measure the success of these groups?

Considering the purpose of Facebook Groups as a platform for connecting users through shared interests or real-life relationships, which metrics would be appropriate to measure the success of these groups?

Let’s say you’re interning at a fintech startup that’s building a platform for online games of chance. During testing, one of your simulations flips a coin 10 times and gets 8 tails and 2 heads.

How would you determine if the coin is fair, and what statistical approach would you use to support your conclusion?

How would you assess if a coin is fair after observing 8 tails in 10 flips?

Fair Coin

Amazon has a warehouse system where items on the website are located at different distribution centers across a city. Let’s say in one example city, the probability that a specific item X is available at warehouse A or warehouse B are 0.6 and 0.8 respectively.

Given that you’re a customer in this example city and the items are only found on the website if they exist in the distribution centers, what is the probability that the item X would be found on Amazon’s website?

<ol>
<li>A ride-sharing app has probability $p$ of dispensing a $5 coupon to a rider. The app services $N$ riders. How much should we budget for the coupon initiative in total?</li>
<li>A driver using the app picks up two passengers.</li>
</ol>

<ul>
<li>What is the probability of both riders getting the coupon?</li>
<li>What is the probability that only one of them will get the coupon?</li>
</ul>

Compute the total coupon budget for N riders and the probabilities that both or only one of two riders get the coupon

Ride Coupon

Let’s say that there are six people trying to divide up into two equally separate teams. Because they want to pick random teams, on each round, each person shows their hand in either a face-up or face-down position. If there are three of each position, then they’ll split into teams. 

What’s the expected number of rounds that everyone will have to pick a hand side before they split into teams?

What’s the expected number of rounds until three people show face-up and three show face-down?

Estimated Rounds

Let’s say you’re given all the different marketing channels along with their respective marketing costs at a company called Mode, that sells B2B analytics dashboards.

What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel?

When determining the value of each marketing channel for the company Mode, which metric is considered the key metric?

When determining the value of each marketing channel for the company Mode, which metric is considered the key metric?

Marketing Channel Metrics

What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel?

Analytics

Suppose there are one million users and we want to expose 1000 users per day to a test. The same user can be selected twice for the test.

<ol>
<li>What’s the expected value of how long someone will have to wait before they receive the test?</li>

<li>What is the likelihood they get selected after the first day? Is that closer to 0 or 1?</li>
</ol>

Suppose there are one million users and we want to expose 1000 users per day to a test. The same user can be selected twice for the test.What's the expected value of how long someone will have to wait before they receive the test?

Suppose there are one million users and we want to expose 1000 users per day to a test. The same user can be selected twice for the test.What's the expected value of how long someone will have to wait before they receive the test?

Expected Tests

Let’s say you’re working on a building a better search engine for Google. You build it and want to see if it serves better results than the existing one in production.

How would you determine which search engine performed better? Which metrics would you track?

How would you determine which search engine performed better and which metrics would you track

Comparing Search Engines

A/B Testing

A group of 100 students are participating in a coin-tossing challenge at a school event. Each student flips a fair coin once:
- If the coin lands on heads, the student wins and truthfully reports their win.
- If the coin lands on tails, the student flips again:
 - If the second flip is heads, the student lies and claims they won, even though they lost.
 - If the second flip is tails, the student truthfully reports their loss.

At the end of the game, 30 students report that they won. As an analyst, you are tasked with determining the expected number of students who actually won the game (i.e., got heads on their first flip).

Example:

Suppose only 8 students report winning. How many students would you expect to have truly won based on the rules above?

Note: You may assume each coin flip is independent and fair (probability of heads = 0.5).

Given win reports in a coin toss game with lying, estimate the true number of winners.

Secret Wins

Three zebras are chilling in the desert. Suddenly a lion attacks.
Each zebra is sitting on a corner of a triangle with sides of equal length.
Each zebra randomly picks a direction and only runs along the outline of the triangle to either edge of the triangle.

What is the probability that none of the zebras collide?

Three zebras are chilling in the desert. Suddenly a lion attacks.

Each zebra is sitting on a corner of a triangle with side of equal length. Each zebra randomly picks a direction and only runs along the outline of the triangle to either edge of the triangle.

What is the probability that none of the zebras collide?

Three zebras are chilling in the desert. Suddenly a lion attacks.

Each zebra is sitting on a corner of a triangle with side of equal length.  Each zebra randomly picks a direction and only runs along the outline of the triangle to either edge of the triangle.

What is the probability that none of the zebras collide?



Three Zebras

Brainteasers

Let’s say you’re a data scientist at LinkedIn where you’re working on a product that sends qualified job candidates to companies. The team has launched a new feature that allows candidates to message hiring managers at companies directly during the interview process to get updates on their status.

Due to engineering constraints, the company can’t AB test the feature before launching it.

How would you analyze how the feature is performing?

How would you analyze the performance of a new LinkedIn feature that lets candidates message hiring managers during the interview process

Recruiting Leads

Given three random variables independently and identically distributed from a uniform distribution of 0 to 4, what is the probability that the median of them is greater than 3?

How can we calculate the probability that the median of three random variables from a uniform distribution of 0 to 4 is greater than 3?

How can we calculate the probability that the median of three random variables from a uniform distribution of 0 to 4 is greater than 3?

Median Probability

Given three uniform(0,4) random variables, what is the probability that the median of them is greater than 3?

Let’s say we’re given a biased coin that comes up heads 30% of the time when tossed.

What is the probability of the coin landing as heads exactly 5 times out of 6 tosses?

Biased five out of six

Let’s say that you work for an online media company. The media company is starting to monetize its web traffic and wants to experiment with adding web banners into the middle of its reading content to see if it can monetize effectively.

How would you measure the success of the banner ad strategy?

How would you measure the success of a banner ad strategy?

Banner Ad Strategy Success

Let’s say you’re a product data scientist at Facebook. Facebook is rolling out a new feature called “Mentions” which is an app specifically for celebrities on Facebook to connect with their fans.

How would you measure the health of the Mentions app? And if a celebrity starts using Mentions and begins interacting with their fans more, what part of the increase can be attributed to a celebrity using Mentions versus what part is just a celebrity wanting to get more involved in fan engagement?

How would you measure the health of the Mentions app and attribute increased fan engagement to Mentions versus celebrity intent

Celebrity Mentions

Imagine you are asked to build a machine learning model to decide new loan approvals for a
financial firm. You ask the data department in the company for a subset of data to get started
working on the problem. The data includes different features about applicants such as age,
occupation, zip code, height, number of children, favorite color, etc. You decide to build
multiple machine learning models to test out different ideas before settling on the best one.

How would you explain the bias-variance tradeoff with regards to
building and choosing a model to use?

Bias vs. Variance Tradeoff

Given a list of numbers <code>nums</code> and an integer <code>window_size</code>, write a function <code>moving_window</code> to find the moving window average.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
window_size = 3
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def moving_window(input, window_size) -&gt; [1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5]
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
window_size = 4
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def moving_window(input, window_size) -&gt; [1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5]
</code></pre>

Write a function moving_window to find the moving window average

Moving Window

Let’s say that you’re in charge of an e-commerce D2C business that sells socks.

What business health metrics would you care about tracking on a company dashboard?

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

Let’s say you are working on Google Docs. A product manager comes to you and asks how the product is doing. 

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

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

Docs Metrics

What do you think are the most important metrics for WhatsApp?

What is the optimal strategy for reducing customer churn rate in a messaging platform like WhatsApp?

What is the optimal strategy for reducing customer churn rate in a messaging platform like WhatsApp?

WhatsApp Metrics

What are the most important metrics for WhatsApp

We’re given two tables, a <code>users</code> table with demographic information and the neighborhood they live in and a <code>neighborhoods</code> table.

Write a query that returns all neighborhoods that have 0 users. 

Example:

Input:

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

<tr>
<td><code>neighborhood_id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>created_at</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<code>neighborhoods</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>name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

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

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

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

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

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