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Scholastic Interview Questions

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Data Structures & Algorithms

Write a function moving_window to find the moving window average

Moving Window

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

Write a function to rotate an array by 90 degrees in the clockwise direction.

Matrix Rotation

Write an algorithm to return the character with the longest continuous repetition, breaking ties by earliest occurrence

Most Repetition

Median O(1)

Machine Learning

Interpret coefficients of logistic regression for categorical and boolean variables

Coefficients of Logistic Regression

Lasso vs Ridge

Explain the key differences between classification models and regression models

Classification and Regression

How would you improve a classification model with low precision

Low Precision

Bias variance tradeoff and class imbalance in finance

Bias - Variance Tradeoff and Class Imbalance in Finance

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 to present complex data insights with clarity and adaptability tailored to a specific audience

Presentations and Insights

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

Why Do You Want to Work With Us

A/B Testing

How would you assess the validity of the result?

Experiment Validity

Button AB Test

How would you design a two-week A/B test to determine whether a pricing increase is a good business decision

Testing Price Increase

Design an A/B test to use the marketing budget most efficiently across multiple new channels

Marketing Dollar Efficiency

An A/B test is being conducted to determine which version of a payment processing page leads to higher conversion rates. You’re responsible for analyzing the results. How would you set up and analyze this A/B test? Additionally, how would you use bootstrap sampling to calculate the confidence intervals for the test results, ensuring your conclusions are statistically valid?

A/B Testing a Checkout Button Change

Statistics

What are the assumptions of linear regression?

Assumptions of Linear Regression

What is the difference between type I and type II errors?

Type I and II Errors

What are confidence intervals and how are they useful

Confidence Interval Explanation

Determine whether using an 83% cutoff overestimates or underestimates the actual population’s credit score

Credit Score Estimation

Given a table of product subscriptions with a subscription start date and end date for each user, write a query that returns true or false whether or not each user has a subscription date range that overlaps with any other completed subscription.

Completed subscriptions have <code>end_date</code> recorded.

Example:

Input:

<code>subscriptions</code> table

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

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

<tr>
<td><code>start_date</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>

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

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th><code>user_id</code></th>
<th><code>start_date</code></th>
<th><code>end_date</code></th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>2019-01-01</td>
<td>2019-01-31</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>2</td>
<td>2019-01-15</td>
<td>2019-01-17</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>2019-01-29</td>
<td>2019-02-04</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>2019-02-05</td>
<td>2019-02-10</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Output:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th><code>user_id</code></th>
<th><code>overlap</code></th>
</tr>
</thead>

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

<tr>
<td>2</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Write a query to return whether each user's subscription date range overlaps with any other completed subscription

Subscription Overlap

Given a table called <code>user_experiences</code>, write a query to determine the percentage of users that held the title of <code>&#34;Data Analyst&#34;</code> immediately before holding the title <code>&#34;Data Scientist&#34;</code>.

Immediate is defined as the user holding no other titles between the <code>&#34;Data Analyst&#34;</code> and <code>&#34;Data Scientist&#34;</code> roles.

Example:

Input:

<code>user_experiences</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>position_name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>start_date</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>end_date</code></td>
<td>DATETIME</td>
</tr>

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

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

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>percentage</code></td>
<td>FLOAT</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

User Experience Percentage

Let’s say that your company is running a standard control and variant AB test on a feature to increase conversion rates on the landing page. The PM checks the results and finds a .04 p-value.

How would you assess the validity of the result?

A team wants to A/B test multiple different changes through a sign-up funnel.

For example, on a page, a button is currently red and at the top of the page. They want to see if changing a button from red to blue and/or from the top of the page to the bottom of the page will increase click-through.

How would you set up this test?

Your team wants to run an AB test on the color (red or blue) and position (top/bottom of the page) of a button that links to a promotion.

How many different variants of the test should you run to see the effect that a red button has on the bottom of the page, if currently the button is blue and on the top of the page.

Your team wants to run an AB test on the color (red or blue) and position (top/bottom of the page) of a button that links to a promotion.

How many different variants of the test should you run to see the effect that a red button has on the bottom of the page, if currently the button is blue and on the top of the page.

A/B Test Variants

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?

Let’s say that you work at a B2B SAAS company that’s interested in testing the pricing of different levels of subscriptions.

Your project manager comes to you and asks you to run a two-week-long A/B test to test an increase in pricing.

How would you approach designing this test? How would you determine whether the increase in pricing is a good business decision?

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>

Google Maps Improvement

Product Sense & Metrics

<h1>Binary Tree Validation</h1>

You are given the root of a binary tree. You need to determine if it is a valid binary search tree (BST).

A valid BST is defined as follows:

<ul>
<li>The left subtree of a node contains only nodes with values less than or equal to the node’s value.</li>
<li>The right subtree of a node contains only nodes with values greater than or equal to the node’s value.</li>
<li>Both the left and right subtrees must also be binary search trees.</li>
</ul>

Given the function <code>def is_valid_bst(root: Node) -&gt; bool:</code>, return True if the binary tree is a valid BST. Otherwise, return False.

<h3>Example:</h3>

Input:

<img src="/s3/questions/9664817c-3e12-4a40-9236-8382b13f55a0.png" alt="image"/>Converted Binary Tree.png

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def is_valid_bst(Node(3)) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

Given the root node, verify if a binary search tree is valid or not.

Binary Tree Validation

Write a Python function called <code>longest_increasing_subsequence</code> that takes a list of integers as input and returns as output the length of the longest increasing subsequence in the list.

Note: An increasing subsequence is a subset of a list where the elements are in strictly increasing order. The subsequence does not have to be contiguous or unique.

<h3>Example:</h3>

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [10, 9, 2, 5, 3, 3, 7, 101, 18]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>4
</code></pre>

Explanation:

The longest increasing subsequence is <code>[2, 3, 7, 101]</code>, for a total length of 4.

Find the longest increasing subsequence in a list of integers.

Longest Increasing Subsequence

Given a string <code>str</code> of any length, write an algorithm <code>max_repeating</code> to return which character has the longest string of continuous repetition.

If two characters are tied for most continuous repetition, return the character whose longest continuous repetition occurs earliest in <code>str</code>.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>str = &#39;aabbaaccbbbaa&#39;
def max_repeating(str) -&gt; b
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>str = &#39;adccccbbbbc&#39;
def max_repeating(str) -&gt; c
</code></pre>

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 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 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?

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?

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

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

Analytics

You’re given a list of sorted integers in which more than 50% of the list is comprised of the same repeating integer.

Write a function to return the median value of the list in \(O(1)\) computational time and space.

Note: the lists are all non-empty

Example:

Input:

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

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>median(li) -&gt; 2
</code></pre>

You work for an insurance SAAS company that sells leads to insurance agents.

The VP of sales at your company asks you to dig into whether more leads delivered to the agents provides more value and retains customers for longer periods of time. They point to a graph that shows agents at month three receiving more than 3x the leads than agents in month one as proof.

What is potentially flawed with the VP’s approach?

What is potentially flawed with the VP's approach?

Insurance Leads

Business Case

Given an array filled with random values, write a function <code>rotate_matrix</code> to rotate the array by 90 degrees in the clockwise direction.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>import numpy as np

array = np.array( [[1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [2, 3, 4, 5, 6], [3, 4, 5, 6, 7], [4, 5, 6, 7, 8], [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]] )

</code></pre>

array
<table><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td><td>5</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>4</td><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>7</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>7</td><td>8</td><td>9</td></tr></tbody></table>

Output:

<table><tbody><tr><td>5</td><td>4</td><td>3</td><td>2</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>4</td><td>3</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>4</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>7</td><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>8</td><td>7</td><td>6</td><td>5</td></tr></tbody></table>

You’re given <code>numlists</code>, a list where each element is a list of at least five numbers.

Write a function <code>list_fifths</code> that returns a list of the fifth-largest number from each element in <code>numlists</code>. Return the list in ascending order.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>numlists = [ [1,2,3,4,5], [3,1,2,5,4], [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], 
[99, 320, 400, 100.25, 55.2, 0.1] ]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def list_fifths(numlists) -&gt; [1, 1, 3, 55.2]
</code></pre>

Write a function list_fifths that returns the fifth-largest number from each list in numlists in ascending order

5th Largest Number

You’ve been tasked with building a classification machine-learning model to predict whether a transaction is either fraud or not fraud for a credit card company. You have ten years of historical data on transactions, including a flag for whether a transaction was manually identified as fraud.

Describe how you might go about building a fraud detection model for credit card transactions. Be sure to mention the possible model types, discuss the bias-variance tradeoff in model development, and address any complexities that arise from the class imbalance.

Input features in the data include:

<ul>
<li>Transaction amount</li>
<li>Merchant category for the transaction</li>
<li>Zip code for the merchant</li>
<li>Zip code for the billing address</li>
<li>Average transaction amount for the account over the past six months</li>
</ul>

Output feature:

<ul>
<li>0/1 flag for fraud (0 = not fraud, 1 = fraud)</li>
</ul>

Note: Fraudulent transactions are (thankfully) a very small percentage of all historical transactions. Assume fraudulent transactions are 0.01% of historical data.While building the model to perform the classification, you need to consider the bias/variance tradeoff, and take into account the fact that there is a class imbalance (very few of the observations are “fraud”).

In the context of hypothesis testing, what are type I errors (type one errors) and type II errors (type two errors)? What is the difference between the two?

Bonus: Describe the probability of making each type of error mathematically.

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

Let’s say you’re in a supermarket.

You’ve found out that there is a huge discount on some items you want; unfortunately, you only have one bag with a certain <code>bag_capacity</code>. Each of the items has its own <code>value</code> and <code>capacity</code>, stored in lists called <code>values</code> and <code>capacities</code> contained in a dictionary called <code>items</code>.

Write a function to pick the items that maximize the total value without exceeding the bag’s capacity and return the total value.

Note: You can’t take more than one copy of each item home. Also, you do not need to fill the entire bag to capacity.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>items = {
 &#34;values&#34;:[2,3,1,4],
 &#34;capacities&#34;:[2, 4, 6, 5]
}

bag_capacity = 8
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>max_profit(items,bag_capacity) -&gt; 6
</code></pre>

We choose the first and last item with a total profit of 6 and a capacity of 7, which is less than the <code>bag_capacity</code>.

Write a function to pick the items that maximize the total value without exceeding the bag’s capacity

Filling Supermarket Bag

When an interviewer asks you a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>Why did you apply to our company?</li>
<li>What are you looking for in your next job?</li>
<li>What makes you a good fit for our company?</li>
</ul>

How should you respond?

When asked 'What are you looking for in your next job?' in an interview, how can you tie the company's employee benefits into your response?

When asked 'What are you looking for in your next job?' in an interview, how can you tie the company's employee benefits into your response?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us I

How can company values be used effectively in an interview when asked 'What makes you a good fit for our company?'

How can company values be used effectively in an interview when asked 'What makes you a good fit for our company?'

Why Do You Want to Work With Us II

When responding to the question 'Why did you apply to our company?' during an interview, what aspect should you highlight?

When responding to the question 'Why did you apply to our company?' during an interview, what aspect should you highlight?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us III

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>

You’re drawing from a random variable that is normally distributed \(X \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1)\)  once per day.

What is the expected number of days that it takes to draw a value that’s higher that 2?

How many draws from a standard normal distribution would you expect to take to obtain a value higher than 2?

How many draws from a standard normal distribution would you expect to take to obtain a value higher than 2?

Drawing Random Variable

What is the expected number of days to draw a value higher than 2

Probability

You work as a backend engineer at Glassdoor. The company relies on multiple legacy systems to aggregate and process job postings, salary data, and company reviews. To ensure reliable data ingestion and processing, you are tasked with building a monitoring service that tracks the health of these legacy systems via regular heartbeat signals.

The service must expose one endpoint to receive heartbeat signals from each legacy system, and another endpoint to return a list of systems that have not sent a heartbeat in the last five seconds. How would you architect this monitoring system? Write a technical design document describing your approach.

Design a monitoring service for legacy system health via heartbeat endpoints at Glassdoor.

Legacy System Heartbeat Monitor

DevOps

One of the basic steps in parsing string inputs is to check whether the opening and closing characters or tags match, i.e., to check if each opened parenthesis is closed eventually.

Given a list of strings, write a <code>string</code> <code>parser</code> that verifies the integrity of the parenthesis used in the string. The parser should return a list of booleans stating whether that string’s integrity was verified.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>list_of_strings = [
 &#39;f(x) + g(x)&#39;, 
 &#39;sin(exp(x)}&#39;, 
 &#39;((())just some string)&#39;, 
 &#39;(4,{(3,4):x**2)&#39;]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def string_parser(list_of_strings) -&gt; [True, False, True, True]
</code></pre>

Given a list of strings, verify whether the parentheses in each string are properly opened and closed.

Check Matching Parentheses

You’re building a machine learning model to predict hospital readmission risk using patient records from the past five years. The data includes patient demographics, diagnoses, treatment history, and outcomes, but hospitals periodically change treatment protocols and data collection standards over time.

How would you structure your training, validation, and test splits to ensure your model generalizes to future patients? What risks would arise if these datasets were not clearly separated, and how would you validate that your final evaluation reflects real-world performance?

How would you structure your training, validation, and test splits to ensure your model generalizes to future patients? 

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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