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PPG Interview Questions

PPG Interview Guides

Machine Learning

Which model would perform better and why?

Booking Regression

How do we deal with the missing square footage data to construct our model

Missing Housing Data

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

Bank Fraud Model

Lasso vs Ridge

Rebalancing outcome probabilities for a classifier on imbalanced data.

Rebalance Probabilities

Statistics

What are the assumptions of linear regression?

Assumptions of Linear Regression

Explain the difference between covariance and correlation and provide an example

Covariance vs Correlation

How do you detect and handle correlation between variables in linear regression, and what happens if you ignore it

Correlation in Regression

What does it mean to "bootstrap" a data set?

Bootstrapping Samples

What are the regression coefficients when regressing Y on X versus X on Y, given Y = X plus normal white noise?

Regress Y on X

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

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

Data Structures & Algorithms

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

Prime to N

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 that tests whether a string of brackets is balanced.

The Brackets Problem

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

String Palindromes

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

What do you tell an interviewer when they ask you what your strengths and weaknesses are?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses

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

Why Do You Want to Work With Us

Let’s say we want to build a model to predict booking prices on Airbnb.

Between linear regression and random forest regression, which model would perform better and why?

What are the two key concepts of random forest regression?

What are the two key concepts of random forest regression?

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?

What are the assumptions of linear regression?

Which assumption of the residuals of the standard linear regression model can not be overcome by increasing the sample size?

Regression assumptions

How do you detect and handle correlation between variables in linear regression? What will happen if you ignore the correlation in the regression model?

Given a matrix of X and y values, write a function to generate a transposed matrix and estimate the parameters for linear regression.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>A = [[1, 5], [4,8], [5,9]]

</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>#Output
linear_regression(A) -&gt; [[[1, 4, 5], [5, 8, 9]] , [4, 1]]
</code></pre>

Note: Return the solutions a list of `[[A_T] , [coefficients]]

Find the linear regression parameters of a given matrix

Linear Regression Parameters

Suppose we have two variables, X and Y, where Y = X + some normal white noise.

<ol>
<li>What will our coefficient be if we run a regression of Y on X?</li>

<li>What happens if we run a regression of X on Y?</li>
</ol>

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>

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?

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 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

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

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.

We want to build a model to predict housing prices in the city of Seattle. We’ve scraped 100K sold listings over the past three years but found that around 20% of the listings are missing square footage data.

How do we deal with the missing data to construct our model?

We want to build a model to predict housing prices in the city of Seattle. We’ve scraped 100K sold listings over the past three years, but have discovered that around 20% of the listings are missing square footage data.

How would you approach dealing with this missing data, in order to construct the most useful predictive model possible?

We want to build a model to predict housing prices in the city of Seattle. We’ve scraped 100K sold listings over the past three years, but have discovered that around 20% of the listings are missing square footage data.

How would you approach dealing with this missing data, in order to construct the most useful predictive model possible?



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

Product Sense & Metrics

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

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

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

How would you handle the data preparation for building a machine learning model using imbalanced data?

Addressing imbalanced data in machine learning through carefully prepared techniques.

Data Preparation for Imbalanced Data

Let’s say that you’re training a classification model.

How would you combat overfitting when building tree-based models?

Let's say that you're training a classification model.   How would you combat overfitting when building tree-based models?

Overfit Avoidance

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>

Let’s say we’re managing a production line for assembling electric scooters, with 10 stations where each has a different average processing time per unit (for example, Station 1 takes 5 minutes, Station 2 takes 3 minutes, and so on).

How would you determine the right metric to use for balancing worker allocation across the stations, and how would you use it to figure out how many workers each station needs?

How would you decide on a metric and approach for worker allocation across an uneven production line?

Worker Distribution Dilemma

Supply Chain

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?

When an interviewer asks a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>What would your current manager say about you? What constructive criticisms might he give?</li>
<li>What are your three biggest strengths and weaknesses you have identified in yourself?</li>
</ul>

How would you respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses I

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses II

Let’s say you work for an e-commerce company. Vendors can send products to the company’s warehouse to be listed on the website. Users are able to order any in-stock products and submit returns for refunds if they’re not satisfied.

The front end of the website includes a vendor portal that provides sales data in daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly intervals.

The company wants to expand worldwide. They put you in charge of designing its end-to-end architecture, so you need to know what significant factors you’ll need to consider. What clarifying questions would you ask?

What kind of end-to-end architecture would you design for this company (both for ETL and reporting)?

How would you design a data warehouse for a e-commerce company looking to expand internationally?

International e-Commerce Warehouse

Let’s say you work for a bank that gives out personal loans. Your co-worker develops a model that takes in customer inputs and returns if a loan should be given or not.

<ol>
<li>What kind of model did the co-worker develop? 
</li>
<li>Another co-worker thinks they have developed a better model to predict defaults on the loans. Given that personal loans are monthly installments of payments, how would you measure the difference between the two credit risk models within a timeframe? 
</li>
<li>What metrics would you track to measure the success of the new model?</li>
</ol>

What kind of model did the co-worker develop, how would you measure the difference between the two credit risk models within a timeframe, and what metrics would you track to measure the success of the new model

Loan Model

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

Let’s say you’re trying to calculate churn for a subscription product.

You noticed that of all customers that bought subscriptions in January 2020, about 10% of them canceled their membership before their next cycle on February 1st.  

If you assume that your new customer acquisition is uniform throughout each month and that customer churn goes down by 20% month over month, what’s the expected churn rate in March for all customers that bought the product since January 1st?

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

Expected Churn

Let’s say you’ve just joined Niagara Bottling as a Supply Chain Specialist, and leadership wants to get a clearer picture of how efficient the supply chain is, but there isn’t a single KPI that captures overall performance yet.

How would you decide which metrics to track to evaluate supply chain efficiency end-to-end, and if you could only pick three to start, which would you choose and why?

Which three metrics would you prioritize to evaluate supply chain efficiency at Niagara Bottling?

Supply Chain Efficiency Metrics

Imagine you run a pizza franchise, and you run into a problem with a lot of no-shows after customers place their order.

What features would you include in a model to try to predict a no-show?

What features would you include in a model to predict a no-show

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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