Practice Interview Questions on Data Science
Data Exploration
What are the key steps in data exploration?
How do you handle missing values in a dataset?
What are outliers? How do you detect and handle them?
What is feature scaling? When should you use MinMaxScaler vs.
StandardScaler?
What is the importance of feature selection, and how do you perform it?
How do you detect data imbalance, and what techniques can be used to handle
it?
Explain the difference between one-hot encoding and label encoding.
How to detect outliers using IQR
Statistics
What is the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics?
Explain the Central tendency
What are Type I and Type II errors?
What is the difference between parametric and non-parametric tests?
How do you determine if a dataset is normally distributed?
What is hypothesis testing?
Machine learning
What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning?
What is cross-validation, and why is it used?
How do you handle categorical variables in supervised learning models
What are some strategies to handle overfitting in machine learning?
What is the difference between bagging and boosting?
Explain how GridSearchCV work.
What are the different types of distance metrics used in machine learning?
Write a Python script to find the best hyperparameters using GridSearchCV.
What is the difference between MSE, RMSE, and MAE?
When would you use Polynomial Regression instead of Linear Regression?
Write a Python script to calculate precision, recall, and F1-score.
How does a decision tree work? How root node is decided
How does a decision tree decide which feature to split on?
Explain how a Random Forest prevents overfitting
How does Random Forest reduce variance in predictions?
What is Feature Importance in Random Forests, and how is it calculated?
How does SVM handle non-linearly separable data?
What is the difference between accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score?
How do you evaluate a regression model’s performance?
What is a confusion matrix, and how is it interpreted?
Why is Mean Squared Error (MSE) preferred over Mean Absolute Error (MAE)
in some cases?
Explain Drawbacks of K means clustering
Explain the difference between agglomerative and divisive hierarchical
clustering.
What is Principal Component Analysis (PCA)?
NLP
What are stop words? How do you handle them in NLP?
What is tokenization? Explain different tokenization methods.
What is stemming vs. lemmatization? Which one is better and why?
What is TF-IDF? How is it different from Bag-of-Words?
What are n-grams, and when would you use them?
Implement tokenization using NLTK and spaCy.
Write a Python function to remove stopwords from text.
Implement stemming and lemmatization in Python.
What is the difference between stemming and lemmatization?
Deep Learning
How does an RNN process sequential data?
Explain the backpropagation algorithm in detail.
What is the role of activation functions in neural networks?
How do CNNs differ from traditional neural networks?
What is the role of convolutional and pooling layers?
Explain how convolutional layers work in CNNs.
Why do we use max pooling in CNNs?