Thanks for the clarification!

Since you have 3 months and already have a

solid grasp of Machine Learning concepts like linear regression,
cross-validation, confusion matrix, Lasso, polynomial regression,
and others, the focus will be on sharpening your DSA skills (to tackle
coding interviews), deepening your ML knowledge, and preparing you for
both technical and behavioral rounds.

Here's a detailed 3-month interview prep roadmap:

Month 1: Master Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA)

Since you already know some DSA concepts, this month will focus on
revision and intensive practice of problem-solving. The goal is to get
comfortable solving problems efficiently and within time constraints.

Week 1–2: Revision of Core DSA Topics

Focus Areas:

• Arrays: Sliding window, two-pointer technique, prefix sums, subarrays.

• Strings: Pattern matching, anagram checks, substring search, and
common string algorithms (KMP, Rabin-Karp).
• Linked Lists: Reverse, detect cycle, merge two lists, find middle.
• Stacks & Queues: Implementations, balanced parentheses, and design
questions.
• Hashing: Hash map, hash set problems (frequency count, finding
duplicates).
• Trees: In-order, pre-order, post-order traversal, BST operations (insert,
delete), height of a tree, lowest common ancestor (LCA).
• Graphs: BFS, DFS, shortest path algorithms (Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford),
topological sort, cycle detection.
• Dynamic Programming: Solve problems like Fibonacci, Knapsack, Coin
Change, Longest Increasing Subsequence (LIS), subset sum.
Recommended Resources:

• LeetCode (focus on easy/medium problems)

• GeeksforGeeks (practice from their interview questions list)
• Cracking the Coding Interview: Work through problems from this book,
focusing on arrays, strings, linked lists, and trees.
Key Practice:

• Solve 3-5 problems daily on LeetCode, focusing on understanding the

optimal solutions and the time/space complexity.
• Focus on time complexity and space complexity for each problem to
master Big-O notation.

Week 3–4: Advanced DSA Concepts & Mock Interviews

 Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you need to focus on advanced
topics and time management.

Focus Areas:

• Advanced Trees: AVL trees, Binary Search Tree (BST) problems, range
queries.
• Heaps: Priority queues, heapify, merge k sorted lists, heap sort.
• Backtracking: N-Queens, Sudoku solver, permutation generation.
• Graph Algorithms: Dijkstra's algorithm, Bellman-Ford, Floyd-Warshall,
Union-Find, Kruskal’s/Prim’s algorithm.
• Bit Manipulation: XOR operations, finding odd/even, flipping bits,
swapping two numbers.
Practice:

• Solve 2-3 hard problems on LeetCode or Codeforces daily, focusing

on complexity optimization and correctness.
• Use platforms like Pramp or Interviewing.io to schedule mock coding
interviews (practice thinking aloud and coding under time pressure).
Resources:

• LeetCode: Focus on hard level problems as you grow more confident.

• Cracking the Coding Interview (Advanced sections).
• GeeksforGeeks: Advanced DSA problems (graphs, dynamic
programming, etc.).

Month 2: Dive Deeper into ML and Prepare for ML

Interview Questions

In this month, you’ll leverage your existing ML knowledge and push

deeper into topics that are often asked in interviews.

Week 1: Core ML Concepts (Reinforcement)

You already know the basics, so now you need to refine your
understanding and problem-solving skills in the following areas:

Key Topics:

• Linear Regression & Logistic Regression (Understanding the

mathematics behind them, assumptions, and use cases).
• Regularization: Lasso, Ridge, and ElasticNet regression. Bias-variance
tradeoff.
• Classification Metrics: Precision, recall, F1-score, ROC curves, and AUC.
• Overfitting vs. Underfitting: Model selection, bias-variance tradeoff,
cross-validation.
• Gradient Descent: Understanding the optimization process (Stochastic
Gradient Descent, Mini-Batch).
Practice:
 • Implement and optimize regression models and classification models
from scratch.
• Work with real-world datasets to solve problems like house price
prediction, classification problems, etc.
Resources:

• Coursera: Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course (to brush up on core

concepts).
• Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and
TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron.

Week 2–3: Advanced ML Topics

Focus on advanced ML algorithms and the theory behind them. In

interviews, you may be asked about more complex methods and their
applications.

Key Topics:

• Decision Trees: Gini index, entropy, pruning.

• Ensemble Methods: Random Forests, Gradient Boosting (XGBoost,
LightGBM).
• Clustering: K-means, hierarchical clustering.
• Dimensionality Reduction: PCA, t-SNE.
• Neural Networks Basics: Perceptrons, multi-layer neural networks,
backpropagation.
Practice:

• Work on Kaggle competitions to apply these models on real datasets

and understand their performance.
• Solve interview-style questions on machine learning, such as:
◦ How do you handle imbalanced datasets?
◦ How do you select features for a model?
◦ How would you evaluate a classification model?
Resources:

• Kaggle: Participate in beginner-level competitions.

• ML Interview Questions: Use resources like "Machine Learning
Yearning" by Andrew Ng.

Week 4: NLP and ML in Interviews

Given the strong demand for NLP roles, it’s worth understanding key
concepts, even if it’s just for awareness in case they come up during
interviews.

Key Topics:

• Text Preprocessing: Tokenization, stopwords, stemming, lemmatization.

• TF-IDF and Bag of Words: Text vectorization techniques.
• Word Embeddings: Word2Vec, GloVe.
• Basic NLP Tasks: Text classification, Named Entity Recognition (NER),
sentiment analysis.
Practice:

• Build a simple text classification model.

• Use spaCy or NLTK for basic NLP tasks.
Resources:

• Coursera: Natural Language Processing Specialization by deeplearning.ai.

• Kaggle: NLP challenges like Sentiment Analysis, Spam Email
Detection.

Month 3: System Design, Mock Interviews, & Behavioral

Prep

Week 1: System Design Basics

Though system design isn’t a priority in many early-stage interviews,

companies like FAANG often include system design rounds. Get a feel for
common design patterns and practice scalable system design.

Key Topics:

• Design Patterns: Client-server architecture, caching, load balancing.

• Databases: SQL vs. NoSQL, CAP theorem, database sharding.
• Scalability: Horizontal vs. vertical scaling, microservices architecture.
Practice:

• Design a URL shortening service (like Bit.ly).

• Design a file storage system.
• Design a messaging system (e.g., WhatsApp).
Resources:

• System Design Interview by Alex Xu.

• YouTube Channels like Gaurav Sen for system design walkthroughs.

Week 2–3: Mock Interviews and Time Management

It’s time to simulate actual interviews to get comfortable with the process.

Focus Areas:

• Solve coding problems under time pressure.

• Practice explaining your approach and solution clearly.
• Focus on edge cases, optimization, and complexity.
Mock Interview Platforms:

• LeetCode mock interviews.

• Pramp or Interviewing.io for live coding interviews.
• Peer Mock Interviews: Pair up with a friend to do mock interviews.
Week 4: Behavioral Interview Prep

Focus on preparing for behavioral interview questions, which are often

just as important as technical ones.

Key Questions:

• Tell me about a time you handled a difficult situation.

• How do you prioritize tasks in a project?
• What is your greatest achievement in your career?
Preparation:

• Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to structure your
answers.
• Practice with a mentor or peer.
Resources:

• "Cracking the Coding Interview" for common behavioral questions.

Final Week: Final Mock Interviews & Relaxation

• Mock Interviews: Schedule final rounds of mock technical and

behavioral interviews.
• Rest: Take 1–2 days to rest before your interviews to ensure you’re
mentally sharp.

Summary of Timeline (3 months)

1 Month 1: Master DSA and problem-solving (with daily practice).

2 Month 2: Focus on ML topics, advanced algorithms, and **
NLP** basics. 3. Month 3: Prepare for System Design, complete mock
interviews, and polish behavioral skills.

This should set you up for success in both coding interviews and
machine learning/nlp roles.

Let me know if you want further adjustments to the roadmap!