rbhatia46 / Data-Science-Interview-Resources Public

A repository listing out the potential sources which will help you in preparing for a Data
Science/Machine Learning interview. New resources added frequently.

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rbhatia46 … on 31 Oct 2021

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Data-Science-Interview-Resources
First of all, thanks for visiting this repo, congratulations on making a great career choice, I
aim to help you land an amazing Data Science job that you have been dreaming for, by
sharing my experience, interviewing heavily at both large product-based companies and
fast-growing startups, hope you find it useful.

With an increase in demand for so many Data Scientists, it's really hard to successfully get
screened and accepted for an interview. In this repo, I include everything from getting
successfully screened and rocking that interview to land that amazing position, make sure
to nail it with the following resources.

Every Resource I list here is personally verified by me and most of them I have used
personally, which have helped me a lot.
Word of Caution: Data Science/Machine Learning has a very big domain and there are a
lot of things to learn. This by no means is an exhaustive list and is just for helping you out if
you are struggling to find some good resources to start your preparation. However, I try to
cover and update this frequently and my goal is to cover and unify everything into one
resource that you can use to rock those interviews! Please leave a star if you appreciate the
effort.

Note: For contribution, refer Contribution.md

How to get an interview ?

First and foremost, develop the necessary skills and be sound with the
fundamentals, these are some of the horizons you should be extremely comfortable
with -

Business Understanding(this is extremely critical across all seniority levels, but

specifically for people with more than 3 years of experience)
SQL and Databases(very crucial)
Programming Skills(preferably in Python, if you know Scala, extra brownie points
for some specific roles)
Mathematics(Probability, Statistics, Linear Algebra and Calculus) -
https://medium.com/@rbhatia46/essential-probability-statistics-concepts-before-
data-science-bb787b7a5aef
Machine Learning(this includes Deep Learning) and Model building
Data Structures and Algorithms(must and mandatory for top product based
companies like FAANG)
Domain Understanding(Optional for most openings, though very critical for some
roles based on company's requirement)
Literature Review(must for Research based roles) : Being able to read and
understand a new research paper is one of the most essential and demanding
skills needed in the industry today, as the culture of Research and Development,
and innovation grows across most good organizations.
Communication Skills - Being able to explain the analysis and results to business
stakeholders and executives is becoming a really important skill for Data Scientists
these days
Some Engineering knowledge(Not mandatory, but good to have) - Being able to
develop a RESTful API, writing clean and elegant code, Object Oriented
programming are some of the things you can focus on for some extra brownie
points.
Big data knowledge(not mandatory for most openings, but good to have) - Spark,
Hive, Hadoop, Sqoop.
 Build a personal Brand

Develop a good GitHub/portfolio of use-cases you have solved, always strive for
solving end-to-end use cases, which demonstrate the entire Data Science
lifecycle, from business understanding to model deployment.
Write blogs, start a YouTube channel if you enjoy teaching, write a book.
Work on a digital, easy-to-open, easy-to-read, clean, concise and easily
customizable Resume/CV, always include your demo links and source code of
every use-case you have solved.
Participate in Kaggle competitions, build a good Kaggle profile and send them to
potential employers for increasing the chances of getting an interview call real-
quick.

Develop good connections, through LinkedIn, by attending conferences, and doing

everything you can, it's very important to land referrals and get yourself started with the
interview process through good connections. Connect regularly with Data Scientists
working at top product-based organizations, fast-growing startups, build a network,
slowly and steadily, it's very important.`

Some Tips on Resume/CV:

Describe past roles and an impact you made in a quantifiable way, be concise and I
repeat, quantify the impact, rather than talking with facts that have no relevance.
According to Google Recruiters, use the XYZ formula -
Accomplished [X] as
measured by [Y], by doing [Z]

Keep it short, ideally not more than 2 pages, as you might know, an average recruiter
scans your resume only for 6 seconds, and makes a decision based on that.

If you are a fresher and don't have experience, try to solve end-to-end use-cases and
mention them in your CV, preferably with the demo link(makes it easy for the recruiter)
and the link to source code on GitHub.

Avoid too much technical jargon, and this goes without saying, do not mention anything
you are not confident about, this might become a major bottleneck during your
interview.

Some helpful links :

Advice on building Data Portfolio Projects

How to write a killer Software Engineering Resume
Get your Data Science Resume past the ATS
How to write a developer résumé that hiring managers will actually read
Probability and Statistics
Understand the basics of Descriptive Statistics(Really Important for an interview)
40 Question on probability for a Data Science Interview
40 Statistics Interview Problems and Answers for Data Scientists
Probability and Statistics in the context of Deep Learning
Probability v/s Likelihood
Bootstrap Methods - The Swiss Army Knife of any Data Scientist
Confidence Intervals Explained Simply for Data Scientists
P-value Explained Simply for Data Scientists
PDF is not a probability
5 Sampling algorithms every Data Scientist should know
The 10 Statistical Techniques Data Scientists Need to Master

SQL and Data Acquisition

This is probably the entry point of your Data Science project, SQL is one of the most
important skills for any Data Scientist.

5 Common SQL Interview Problems for Data Scientists

46 Questions to test a Data Scientist on SQL
30 SQL Interview Questions curated for FAANG by an Ex-Facebook Data Scientist
SQL Interview Questions
How to ace Data Science Interviews - SQL
3 Must Know SQL Questions to pass your Data Science Interview
10 frequently asked SQL Queries in Interviews
Technical Data Science Interview Questions: SQL and Coding
How to optimize SQL Queries - Datacamp
Ten SQL Concepts You Should Know for Data Science Interviews

Data Preparation and Visualization

5 Feature Selection Algorithms every Data Scientist should know

6 Different Ways to Compensate for Missing Values In a Dataset
A Brief Overview of Outlier Detection Techniques
Cleaning and Prepping Data with Python for Data Science — Best Practices and
Helpful Packages
 When to use which plot for visualization
Ways to detect and remove Outliers
Dealing with Class Imbalances in Machine Learning
Smarter ways to encode categorical data
Numpy and Pandas Cheatsheet
3 Methods to deal with outliers
Feature Selection Techniques
Why, how and When to scale your features
Everything you need to know about Scatter plots
How to Select Features for Machine Learning
10 ways for Feature Selection

Classic Machine Learning Algorithms

1. Logistic Regression
All about Logistic Regression in one article
Understanding Logistic Regression step-by-step
Logistic Regression - Short and Clear Explanation - 9 Mins
Linear Regression vs Logistic Regression
30 Questions to test a Data Scientist on Logistic Regression
Logistic Regression - Understand Everything (Theory + Maths + Coding) in 1 video

2. Linear Regression
30 Questions to test a Data Scientist on Linear Regression
Linear Regression - Understand Everything (Theory + Maths + Coding) in 1 video
5 Types of Regression and their properties
Ridge Regression - Clearly Explained
Lasso Regression - Clearly Explained

3. Tree Based/Ensemble Algorithms

30 Questions to test a Data Scientist on Tree based models
Gini-index v/s Information Entropy
Decision Tree vs. Random Forest – Which Algorithm Should you Use?
Why Random Forest doesn't work well for Time-Series?
Comprehensive guide to Ensemble Models
 The Simple Math behind 3 Decision Tree Splitting criterions

4. K-Nearest-Neighbors
Fundamental Interview Questions on KNN - A Quick refresh
30 Questions to test a Data Scientist on KNN
Pros and Cons of KNN
KNN Algorithm - Understand Everything (Theory + Maths + Coding) in 1 video

5. Support Vector Machines

All about SVMs - Math, Terminology, Intuition, Kernels in one article
25 Questions to test a Data Scientist on SVMs

6. Naive Bayes
12 tips to make most out of Naive Bayes
Naive Bayes - Understand Everything (Theory + Maths + Coding) in 1 video
6 easy steps to learn Naive Bayes

Time Series

40 Questions to test a Data Scientist on Time Series

11 Classical Time Series Forecasting Methods
Interview Questions on ARIMA

Unsupervised Learning

The DOs and DONTs of PCA(Principal Component Analysis)

An introduction to t-SNE : DataCamp
Dimensionally Reducing Squeezing out the good stuff
Dimensionality Reduction for Dummies : Part 1 - Intuition
In-depth Explanation of DBSCAN Algorithm

Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems in a Nutshell

Deep Learning

Why Regularization reduces overfitting in Deep Neural Networks

Pros and Cons of Neural Networks
When not to use Neural Networks
40 Questions to test a Data Scientist on Deep learning
21 Popular Deep Learning Interview Questions
Deep Learning Interview Questions - Edureka
Activation Functions in a Neural Network - Explained
Vanishing and Exploding Gradient - Clearly Explained
Bias and Variance - Very clearly explained
Why use ReLU over Sigmoid
25 Deep Learning Interview Qurstions to test your knowledge
10 Deep Learning Best Practices to Keep in Mind in 2020

Machine Learning Interpretability

Four Questions on Deciphering the World of Machine Learning Models

Machine Learning Explanaibility - Crash Course by Kaggle
SHAP Values explained simply

Case Studies

Case studies are extremely important for interviews, below are some resources to practice,
think first before looking at the solutions.

Dawn of Taxi Aggregators

Optimizing product prices for an online vendor
Tips for a Case-Study Interview
Mercari Price Prediction
End-to-End multiclass Text Classification pipeline
End-to-End multiclass Image Classification pipeline
Large Scale Forecasting for 1000+ products - Nagarro
Clustering and Classification in E-Commerce
The ABCs of Learning to Rank
Data Science Case Study: Optimizing Product Placement in Retail
NLP

30 Questions to test a Data Scientist on NLP

11 Most Commonly Asked NLP Interview Questions For Beginners
How to solve 90% of NLP Problems
Questions asked for NLP Roles at Companies

Data Science Interviews at FAANG and Similar

Companies

Amazon’s Data Scientist Interview Practice Problems

Microsoft Data Science Interview Questions and Answers
Problem Solving Questions for Data Science interview at Google

Becoming a Rockstar Data Scientist(read if you have

extra time)

Going through these will definately add extra brownie points, so don't miss these if you got
time.

Top 13 Skills To Become a Rockstar Data Scientist

Understand these 4 ML concepts to sound like a master
12 things I wish I knew before starting as a Data Scientist
Understand the Data Science pipeline
Kaggle Data Science Glossary
Google Machine Learning Glossary
Running your ML Predictions 50 times faster - Hummingbird
3 Mistakes you should not make in a Data Science Interview
How to find Feature importances for BlackBox Models?

Data Structures and Algorithms(Optional)

Although this might be optional, but do not miss this if the Job Description explicitly asks for
this, and especially never miss this if you are interviewing at FAANG and similar
organizations, or if you have a CS Background. You don't have to be as good as an SDE at
this, but at least know the basics.

A Data Scientist's guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

Handling Trees in Data Science Algorithmic Interview
A simple introduction to Linked Lists for Data Scientists
Dynamic Programming for Data Scientists
3 Programming concepts for Data Scientists
Data Scientists, The 5 Graph Algorithms that you should know

Engineering and Deployment

A Layman’s Guide for Data Scientists to create APIs in minutes

Take your Machine Learning Models to Production with these 5 simple steps
2 way to deploy your ML models
How to deploy a Keras model as a web app through Flask
How to write Web apps using simple Python for Data Scientists?

Big Data and Spark

55 Apache Spark Interview Questions

10 Questions you can expect in a Spark Interview
Hive Interview Questions
Top 20 Apache Spark Interview Questions
Spark Interview Questions - The entire playlist
Another fabulous Playlist for Spark Interview Questions
Practical PySpark tips for Data Scientists
3 Ways to parallelize your code using Spark
Datashader - Revealing the Structure of Genuinely Big Data
Lightnings Talk : What one should know about Spark-MLlib
Solving “Container Killed by Yarn For Exceeding Memory Limits” Exception in Apache
Spark

Some amazing stuff on Python and Spark

You can't afford to miss this if you are interviewing for a Big data role.

Improving Python and Spark performance

High Performance Python on Spark
Vectorized UDFs: Scalable Analysis with Python and PySpark

General Interview Questions across the Spectrum

(Video)

Common Data Science Interview Questions - Edureka

Common Machine Learning Interview Question - Edureka
Top 5 algorithms used in Data Science
Common Data Science Interview Questions - Analytics University
3 types of Data Science Interview Questions
Lessons learned the hard way - Hacking the Data Science Interview
What it's like to Interview as a Data Scientist
5 Tips for getting a Data Science Job
8 Frequently used Data Science Algorithms
Scenario Based Practical Interview
KNN v/s K Means

General Interview Questions across the Spectrum

(Reading)

The Data Science Interview Guide

Top 30 Data Science Interview Questions
35 Important Data Science Interview Questions
100 Data Science Interview Questions across FAANG
The Most Comprehensive Data Science Interview Guide
41 essential ML interview questions - Springboard
30 days of Data Science Interview Preparation - iNeuron
109 Data Science Interview Questions - Springboard
Most asked Data Science interview questions in India - Springboard
List of AI Startups in India and resources for preparing for the interview
5 interview questions to predict a good Data Scientist
8 proven ways to improve the accuracy of your ML model
60 Interview Questions on Machine Learning - AnalyticsIndiaMag
 The Big List of DS and ML interview Resources
100 Basic Data Science Interview Questions along with answers
40 interview questions asked at Startups in ML/DS Interview
My Data Science/Machine Learning Job Interview Experience : List of DS/ML/DL
Questions – Machine Learning in Action
How do I prepare for a Data Science phone interview at Airbnb
Best ML algorithm for regression problems
How to ace the In person Data Science Interview
How to land a Data Scientist job at Airbnb
120 Data Science Interview Questions(from all domains)
Understanding the Bias-Variance Tradeoff
You Need these Cheatsheets if you are tackling ML algorithms
Red Flags in a Data Science Interview
A Data Scientist's take on Interview Questions
What is Cross Entropy(Nice and Short Explanation)
What does an ideal Data Scientist's profile look like
25 Fun Questions for a Machine Learning interview
How to Prepare for Machine Learning Interviews
How to develop a Machine Learning Model from scratch
End to End guide for a Machine Learning Project
Classification v/s Regression
Must Know mathematical measures for Every Data Scientist
Where did the least square come from
Regularization in Machine Learning - Explained

Interesting Reads

3 Common Data Science Career Transitions and how to make them happen
Navigating the Data Science Career Landscape
Which model and how much data

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