Basic Machine Learning Questions

1. Fundamentals of ML
* What is Machine Learning? How does it differ from traditional programming?
* Explain the differences between Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement
Learning.
* What is overfitting? How can you prevent it?
* What is underfitting? How does it impact a model�s performance?
* What is the bias-variance tradeoff?
* What is the difference between parametric and non-parametric models?
* Explain cross-validation. Why is it important?
* What is the difference between classification and regression?
* What are some common loss functions for regression and classification?
* What are the different types of activation functions? When should you use each?
2. Data Preprocessing & Feature Engineering
* Why is feature scaling important? What are the common methods?
* What is one-hot encoding, and when should you use it?
* Explain dimensionality reduction. What techniques can be used?
* What is PCA (Principal Component Analysis)? How does it work?
* What are outliers? How can you handle them?
* What is multicollinearity, and how can you detect it?
* How do you deal with imbalanced datasets?
* Explain the difference between L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization.

Intermediate Machine Learning Questions

3. Model Evaluation & Selection
* What is the difference between precision, recall, and F1-score?
* What is AUC-ROC, and how is it useful?
* What is log loss, and how is it used?
* What is RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error)? How does it compare to MAE?
* What is Cohen�s kappa? When is it useful?
* Explain Grid Search vs. Random Search for hyperparameter tuning.
* How do you handle missing values in a dataset?
* What is cross-entropy loss? How does it work?
4. Machine Learning Algorithms
* Explain Linear Regression. What are its assumptions?
* How does Logistic Regression work?
* What is a Decision Tree? How does it make decisions?
* What is Pruning in Decision Trees?
* How does Random Forest work? Why is it better than a single Decision Tree?
* Explain the working of Support Vector Machines (SVM).
* What is Kernel Trick in SVM?
* How does K-Means Clustering work?
* What is the elbow method in K-Means?
* What are Boosting algorithms (XGBoost, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting)?
* How does Gradient Boosting differ from Random Forest?
* What is the difference between Bagging and Boosting?
* Explain the concept of Markov Chains.

Advanced Machine Learning Questions

5. Deep Learning & Neural Networks
* What is a Neural Network? How does it learn?
* Explain Backpropagation and how gradients are calculated.
* What is the vanishing gradient problem, and how do you solve it?
* What is Batch Normalization? How does it help?
* What are Dropout and Batch Normalization, and why are they used?
* What are Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)? How do they work?
* What is Transfer Learning, and why is it useful?
* What are Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)? How are they different from CNNs?
* What is the difference between LSTM and GRU?
* What are GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks)? How do they work?
* What is Attention Mechanism, and why is it used in NLP models?
6. NLP & Transformers
* What is Word Embedding? Explain Word2Vec and GloVe.
* Explain BERT and GPT. How do they differ?
* What is TF-IDF, and how is it used in NLP?
* How does a Transformer model work?
* What is Self-Attention in Transformers?
* What are Seq2Seq models, and where are they used?
7. Time Series Analysis
* What are ARIMA and SARIMA models?
* What is Exponential Smoothing?
* How does LSTM work for time series forecasting?
* What are seasonal and non-seasonal time series components?
8. ML System Design & Deployment
* How do you deploy a machine learning model?
* What are the common challenges in deploying ML models?
* How would you handle model drift in production?
* What are MLOps best practices?
* Explain model interpretability techniques (SHAP, LIME).
* How do you optimize an ML pipeline for scalability?
* What is AutoML, and when should you use it?

Bonus: Scenario-Based Questions

* How would you design a fraud detection system for a bank?
* How would you develop a recommendation system for an e-commerce website?
* How would you build a real-time traffic prediction model?
* How do you handle an ML model that performs well on training data but poorly on
real-world data?
* If your model is biased against certain groups, how would you fix it?

Basic Questions
1. What is Machine Learning?
Follow-up: Can you explain the difference between supervised, unsupervised, and
reinforcement learning?
2. What are the key differences between machine learning and traditional
programming?
Follow-up: What challenges might arise when designing a system based on ML?
3. Explain the concept of training, validation, and testing datasets.
Follow-up: How would you determine if your model is overfitting?
4. What is feature engineering and why is it important?
Follow-up: Can you provide an example where feature engineering significantly
improved your model�s performance?
5. Define bias and variance in the context of machine learning.
Follow-up: How do these concepts relate to the bias-variance tradeoff?

Intermediate Questions
1. Discuss common algorithms for classification and regression.
Follow-up: When would you choose logistic regression over a decision tree, for
example?
2. How does cross-validation work and why is it used?
Follow-up: What are some pitfalls of cross-validation in time series data?
3. What are ensemble methods? Explain bagging, boosting, and stacking.
Follow-up: Can you share a scenario where an ensemble method outperformed a single
model?
4. How do you handle imbalanced datasets?
Follow-up: What techniques (e.g., oversampling, undersampling, synthetic data
generation) have you used and what were the outcomes?
5. Explain the concept of gradient descent.
Follow-up: What are the differences between batch, mini-batch, and stochastic
gradient descent?
6. How do you evaluate the performance of a machine learning model?
Follow-up: Which metrics would you use for a classification task versus a
regression task?
7. What is regularization, and why is it important?
Follow-up: Explain L1 versus L2 regularization and their effects on model
parameters.

Advanced Questions
1. Explain the mathematics behind support vector machines (SVMs).
Follow-up: How does the kernel trick work, and why is it useful in SVM?
2. Discuss deep learning architectures.
Follow-up: How do convolutional neural networks (CNNs) differ from recurrent neural
networks (RNNs) and when would you use one over the other?
3. How do you approach hyperparameter tuning?
Follow-up: What are the benefits and drawbacks of grid search versus random search
versus more advanced methods like Bayesian optimization?
4. Discuss model interpretability techniques.
Follow-up: What methods would you use to explain complex models like deep neural
networks?
5. Explain how you would deploy a machine learning model to production.
Follow-up: What challenges might you face with scalability, monitoring, and model
updating?
6. Discuss advanced topics such as transfer learning and unsupervised pre-training.
Follow-up: Can you provide an example of when transfer learning was particularly
effective?
7. How do you manage and version control data, models, and experiments in your
workflow?
Follow-up: What tools or frameworks have you found most effective (e.g., MLflow,
DVC)?
8. What are some recent trends in ML research that excite you?
Follow-up: How do you stay updated with the latest developments in the field?
9. Explain the concept of causal inference in machine learning.
Follow-up: How does it differ from standard predictive modeling, and what are its
challenges?
10. Discuss the ethical considerations and potential biases in machine learning
models.
Follow-up: How would you mitigate unintended biases in a deployed system?