Here are some basic AI interview questions you might encounter, along with brief explanations
to help you prepare:
1. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Explanation: AI is a branch of computer science that focuses on creating systems
capable of performing tasks that would normally require human intelligence. This
includes tasks such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language
understanding.
2. What is the difference between AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Deep
Learning (DL)?
Explanation:
o AI is the overarching concept that includes any technique enabling machines to
mimic human behavior.
o ML is a subset of AI that involves training algorithms to learn from data and
improve their performance over time.
o DL is a subset of ML that uses neural networks with many layers (deep networks)
to model complex patterns in large datasets.
3. What is supervised learning?
Explanation: Supervised learning is a type of machine learning where the model is
trained on labeled data. The algorithm learns to map inputs to outputs based on the
provided labels and is evaluated based on its ability to predict outcomes for new, unseen
data.
4. What is unsupervised learning?
Explanation: Unsupervised learning involves training models on data without explicit
labels. The goal is to identify hidden patterns or structures within the data, such as
clustering similar data points or reducing dimensionality.
5. What is overfitting and how can it be prevented?
Explanation: Overfitting occurs when a model learns the training data too well,
including its noise and outliers, leading to poor performance on new data. It can be
prevented by techniques such as cross-validation, regularization (e.g., L1, L2), pruning,
and using more training data.
6. Explain the concept of a confusion matrix.
Explanation: A confusion matrix is a table used to evaluate the performance of a
classification algorithm. It summarizes the number of correct and incorrect predictions
made by the model, showing true positives, false positives, true negatives, and false
negatives.
7. What are precision and recall?
Explanation:
o Precision measures the proportion of positive identifications that were actually
correct: Precision=TPTP+FP\text{Precision} = \frac{TP}{TP +
FP}Precision=TP+FPTP.
o Recall (or Sensitivity) measures the proportion of actual positives that were
correctly identified: Recall=TPTP+FN\text{Recall} = \frac{TP}{TP +
FN}Recall=TP+FNTP.
8. What is a neural network?
Explanation: A neural network is a computational model inspired by the human brain,
consisting of layers of interconnected nodes (neurons). Each connection has a weight that
is adjusted during training to minimize the error in predictions.
9. What is the purpose of activation functions in neural networks?
Explanation: Activation functions introduce non-linearity into the network, allowing it
to learn and model complex patterns. Common activation functions include Sigmoid,
ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit), and Tanh.
10. What is gradient descent?
Explanation: Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm used to minimize the loss
function by iteratively adjusting the model’s parameters in the direction of the steepest
descent of the gradient. Variants include Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Mini-
batch Gradient Descent.
11. Explain the bias-variance tradeoff.
Explanation: The bias-variance tradeoff refers to the balance between bias (error due to
overly simplistic models) and variance (error due to overly complex models). The goal is
to find a model that achieves a good balance, minimizing total error on new data.
12. What is cross-validation?
Explanation: Cross-validation is a technique used to assess how the results of a
statistical analysis will generalize to an independent dataset. It involves partitioning the
data into subsets, training the model on some subsets, and validating it on the remaining
subsets.
13. What is regularization?
Explanation: Regularization is a technique used to prevent overfitting by adding a
penalty to the loss function. Common regularization methods include L1 (Lasso) and L2
(Ridge) regularization, which constrain the size of the coefficients.
14. What are some common evaluation metrics for regression models?
Explanation: Common metrics include Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared
Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and R-squared (Coefficient of
Determination).
15. What is the difference between bagging and boosting?
Explanation:
o Bagging (Bootstrap Aggregating) involves training multiple models
independently on different subsets of the data and combining their predictions to
reduce variance.
o Boosting involves sequentially training models, where each model corrects the
errors of the previous one, combining their predictions to reduce bias.
16. What is a Support Vector Machine (SVM)?
Explanation: SVM is a supervised learning algorithm used for classification and
regression. It finds the hyperplane that best separates different classes in the feature space
by maximizing the margin between the classes.
17. What are ensemble methods?
Explanation: Ensemble methods combine the predictions of multiple models to improve
overall performance. Common ensemble methods include bagging, boosting, and
stacking.
18. What is Principal Component Analysis (PCA)?
Explanation: PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique that transforms data into a set
of orthogonal (uncorrelated) components called principal components, which capture the
maximum variance in the data.
19. What is the difference between classification and regression?
Explanation:
o Classification is used to predict categorical outcomes (e.g., spam vs. non-spam
emails).
o Regression is used to predict continuous numerical outcomes (e.g., house prices,
temperature).
20. Explain the concept of overfitting and underfitting.
Explanation:
o Overfitting occurs when a model is too complex and captures noise in the
training data, leading to poor generalization to new data.
o Underfitting occurs when a model is too simple to capture the underlying
patterns in the data, resulting in poor performance on both training and test data.
These questions cover a range of basic concepts in AI and ML, and preparing answers to them
will help you build a solid foundation for your interview.
