Machine Learning Interview Questions – Set 21

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When does regularization becomes necessary in Machine Learning?

Regularization becomes necessary when the model begins to ovefit / underfit. This technique introduces a cost term for bringing in more features with the objective function. Hence, it tries to push the coefficients for many variables to zero and hence reduce cost term. This helps to reduce model complexity so that the model can become better at predicting (generalizing).

How is True Positive Rate and Recall related? Write the equation.

True Positive Rate = Recall. Yes, they are equal having the formula (TP/TP + FN).

What do you think is the most valuable data in our business?

This question or questions like it really try to test you on two dimensions. The first is your knowledge of the business and the industry itself, as well as your understanding of the business model. The second is whether you can pick how correlated data is to business outcomes in general, and then how you apply that thinking to your context about the company. You’ll want to research the business model and ask good questions to your recruiter—and start thinking about what business problems they probably want to solve most with their data.

What are the advantages of using a naive Bayes for classification?

  • Very simple, easy to implement and fast.
  • If the NB conditional independence assumption holds, then it will converge quicker than discriminative models like logistic regression.
  • Even if the NB assumption doesn’t hold, it works great in practice.
  • Need less training data.
  • Highly scalable. It scales linearly with the number of predictors and data points.
  • Can be used for both binary and mult-iclass classification problems.
  • Can make probabilistic predictions.
  • Handles continuous and discrete data.
  • Not sensitive to irrelevant features.

OLS is to linear regression. Maximum likelihood is to logistic regression. Explain the statement.

OLS and Maximum likelihood are the methods used by the respective regression methods to approximate the unknown parameter (coefficient) value. In simple words,

Ordinary least square(OLS) is a method used in linear regression which approximates the parameters resulting in minimum distance between actual and predicted values. Maximum Likelihood helps in choosing the the values of parameters which maximizes the likelihood that the parameters are most likely to produce observed data.

How would you implement a recommendation system for our company’s users?

A lot of machine learning interview questions of this type will involve the implementation of machine learning models to a company’s problems. You’ll have to research the company and its industry in-depth, especially the revenue drivers the company has, and the types of users the company takes on in the context of the industry it’s in.

Are Gaussian Naive Bayes the same as binomial Naive Bayes?

Binomial Naive Bayes: It assumes that all our features are binary such that they take only two values. Means 0s can represent “word does not occur in the document” and 1s as “word occurs in the document”.

Gaussian Naive Bayes: Because of the assumption of the normal distribution, Gaussian Naive Bayes is used in cases when all our features are continuous. For example in Iris dataset features are sepal width, petal width, sepal length, petal length. So its features can have different values in the data set as width and length can vary. We can’t represent features in terms of their occurrences. This means data is continuous. Hence we use Gaussian Naive Bayes here.

‘People who bought this also bought…’ recommendations seen on Amazon is based on which algorithm?

E-commerce websites like Amazon make use of Machine Learning to recommend products to their customers. The basic idea of this kind of recommendation comes from collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is the process of comparing users with similar shopping behaviors in order to recommend products to a new user with similar shopping behavior.

What are the areas in robotics and information processing where sequential prediction problem arises?

The areas in robotics and information processing where sequential prediction problem arises are

  • Imitation Learning
  • Structured prediction
  • Model based reinforcement learning

What is Linear Regression?

Linear Function can be defined as a Mathematical function on a 2D plane as, Y =Mx +C, where Y is a dependent variable and X is Independent Variable, C is Intercept and M is slope and same can be expressed as Y is a Function of X or Y = F(x).

At any given value of X, one can compute the value of Y, using the equation of Line. This relation between Y and X, with a degree of the polynomial as 1 is called Linear Regression.

In Predictive Modeling, LR is represented as Y = Bo + B1x1 + B2x2
The value of B1 and B2 determines the strength of the correlation between features and the dependent variable.

Example: Stock Value in $ = Intercept + (+/-B1)*(Opening value of Stock) + (+/-B2)*(Previous Day Highest value of Stock)