Machine Learning Interview Questions

You are given a data set on cancer detection. You’ve build a classification model and achieved an accuracy of 96%. Why shouldn’t you be happy with your model performance? What can you do about it?

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If you have worked on enough data sets, you should deduce that cancer detection results in imbalanced data. In an imbalanced data set, accuracy should not be used as a measure of performance because 96% (as given) might only be predicting majority class correctly, but our class of interest is minority class (4%) which is … Read more

You are given a data set. The data set has missing values which spread along 1 standard deviation from the median. What percentage of data would remain unaffected? Why?

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This question has enough hints for you to start thinking! Since, the data is spread across median, let’s assume it’s a normal distribution. We know, in a normal distribution, ~68% of the data lies in 1 standard deviation from mean (or mode, median), which leaves ~32% of the data unaffected. Therefore, ~32% of the data … Read more

Is rotation necessary in PCA? If yes, Why? What will happen if you don’t rotate the components?

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Yes, rotation (orthogonal) is necessary because it maximizes the difference between variance captured by the component. This makes the components easier to interpret. Not to forget, that’s the motive of doing PCA where, we aim to select fewer components (than features) which can explain the maximum variance in the data set. By doing rotation, the … Read more

You are given a train data set having 1000 columns and 1 million rows. The data set is based on a classification problem. Your manager has asked you to reduce the dimension of this data so that model computation time can be reduced. Your machine has memory constraints. What would you do? (You are free to make practical assumptions.)

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Processing a high dimensional data on a limited memory machine is a strenuous task, your interviewer would be fully aware of that. Following are the methods you can use to tackle such situation: Since we have lower RAM, we should close all other applications in our machine, including the web browser, so that most of … Read more