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Google Data Science Interview Questions

The document outlines key concepts related to linear regression, including assumptions of error such as independence, homoscedasticity, and normality. It discusses the role of p-values in high-dimensional linear regression and the need for adjustments to avoid false positives. Additionally, it covers techniques for encoding high-cardinality categorical variables and explains how Principal Component Analysis (PCA) works for dimensionality reduction.

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12 views6 pages

Google Data Science Interview Questions

The document outlines key concepts related to linear regression, including assumptions of error such as independence, homoscedasticity, and normality. It discusses the role of p-values in high-dimensional linear regression and the need for adjustments to avoid false positives. Additionally, it covers techniques for encoding high-cardinality categorical variables and explains how Principal Component Analysis (PCA) works for dimensionality reduction.

Uploaded by

ritikapawayyy
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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GOOGLE

DATA
SCIENCE
INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS
WHAT ARE THE ASSUMPTIONS OF ERROR IN LINEAR
REGRESSION

Independence of Errors - The error terms should be


1
independent of each other. This means that there should be
no correlation between consecutive errors (no
autocorrelation). This assumption is often tested using the
Durbin-Watson test in time series data.

Homoscedasticity - The variance of the error terms should


remain constant across all levels of the independent
variables. If the variance of the errors increases or
decreases (heteroscedasticity), it can lead to inefficiencies
in the estimation of coefficients.

Normality of Errors - The error terms should be normally


distributed, especially for hypothesis testing (i.e., t-tests for
coefficients). This assumption is crucial when constructing
confidence intervals and p-values.
WHAT IS THE FUNCTION OF P-VALUES IN HIGH
DIMENSIONAL LINEAR REGRESSION? 2
P-values are used to test the null hypothesis that a specific
regression coefficient (for a predictor) is zero. A low p-value
suggests that the predictor is statistically significant,
meaning it likely has an effect on the response variable.

In high-dimensional models, testing many predictors


increases the chance of false positives (Type I errors),
meaning some predictors might appear significant purely by
chance. Traditional pvalues need to be adjusted (e.g.,
Bonferroni correction, FDR methods) to account for this.

High-dimensional data often has strong multicollinearity,


meaning many predictors are highly correlated. This can
cause unstable estimates of regression coefficients, leading
to unreliable pvalues. So make sure to remove correlated
features
LET’S SAY YOU HAVE A CATEGORICAL VARIABLE
WITH THOUSANDS OF DISTINCT VALUES, HOW
WOULD YOU ENCODE IT?
3
Leave-One-Out Encoding A variation of target encoding,
leave-one-out encoding, computes the target mean for each
category, but excludes the current observation to avoid
target leakage.

Pros: Reduces target leakage, works well with highcardinality


features.
Cons: Computationally more expensive than simple target
encoding.

Embedding-Based Encoding - For extremely high cardinality


categorical features, embedding-based approaches are
often effective. This technique involves learning a dense
vector representation of each category, and you typically
use a NN to get the embedding.

Pros: Captures latent structure


Cons: More complex to implement
DESCRIBE TO ME HOW PCA WORKS
4
PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique used if you
think you have correlated features, noisy data, or to
visualize data in fewer dimensions.

To perform PCA you normalize features, calculate


covariance matrix (to indicate if variable increase/decrease
when another variables does), find eigenvectors (directions
where data is most spread out) or eigenvalues (amount of
variance/spread)

PCA does assume variables are linearly related, so cant be


used for non-linear relationships. Also, new dimension are
linear combination of older dimension so interpretation
does become harder.
THANK YOU

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