Meta Statistics & Math Interview Questions
Master your tech interview with our curated database of real questions from top companies.
Fake Accounts [AE]
Detecting and Managing Bad Accounts on a Social Platform 1) Probability of a Bad Account Sending Friend Requests Context: 1% of accounts are bad. Bad ...
Analyze User Comment Distribution and Sampling Effects
Scenario You are analyzing daily comment counts per user. The per-user distribution of counts is right-skewed (many zeros/low counts and a long right ...
Calculate Posterior Probability of Flagged User Being Bad Actor
Bayesian inference for abuse detection with error control Setup A platform runs a binary classifier that flags users who might be bad actors. Let: - p...
Analyze Distribution of Daily Page Shares Per User
Engagement Distributions and Cohort Dynamics You are analyzing per-user, per-day engagement. Assume a day-level panel with all users included (inactiv...
Analyze Central Limit Theorem in User Comment Distribution
Comments per User — CLT, Expectation, SD, and 95% CI Context You are measuring how many comments each user makes in a fixed time window (e.g., one wee...
Determine Key Statistics for Article Comment Distribution Analysis
Analyzing Comment Counts per Article Context You are analyzing the number of comments each article receives on a content website. You have the full di...
Evaluate Probability of Positive User Comments and Model Performance
Social-Media Positivity: Independence and Model Comparison Context You are evaluating user comment sentiment and the performance of two models that cl...
Calculate Expected Meetings in Randomly Assigned Rooms
Random Assignment of Meetings to Rooms Scenario - There are N rooms and K meetings. Each meeting independently chooses a room uniformly at random (pro...
Calculate Ad Insertion Statistics for Two Methods
Scenario Evaluating two ad-insertion strategies in a 100-post feed. - Option A (independent placement): Each post independently becomes an ad with pro...
Calculate Probabilities for Mixed Reviewer Types
Scenario Two types of reviewers exist in a marketplace: - Lazy reviewers (20%) always give good reviews. - Careful reviewers (80%) give good reviews 6...
Identify Probability Distributions for Modeling Ad Clicks
Context You are interviewing for a data scientist role on an ads team. You are asked to demonstrate knowledge of common probability models for clicks,...
Analyze Video View Distribution: Mode, Median, Mean Comparison
Scenario You are analyzing user engagement on a short‑video sharing product. You have a distribution of “video views per user,” and you observe that a...
Determine Probability of Shared Videos in Recommendations
Video Recommendation Probability and Product Trade-offs Scenario A video-recommendation system selects K distinct videos for each user from an invento...
Model Unique Recipients with Poisson Distribution and Test Fit
Modeling Unique Recipients per Caller Scenario You need to model the distribution of the count of unique recipients each caller contacts in a fixed ti...
Compare Ad-Insertion Strategies: Expected Ads and Probabilities
Newsfeed Ad-Insertion Strategies You are evaluating two ways to insert ads into a user's newsfeed. Assume a user views a contiguous sequence of posts....
Calculate Expected Day for First Selection in Sampling
Daily Sampling: First-Selection Day Context - There are 1,000 people. Each day, 10 distinct names are drawn uniformly at random. - We consider two reg...
Determine Posterior Probability of Bad User Prediction
Evaluating a Classifier That Flags Bad Actors Question You are evaluating a binary classifier for detecting bad actors among users. Given: - Prevalenc...
Design Sampling Strategy to Estimate Fake News Proportion
Estimating Fake News Prevalence and Impact on Facebook Context Management is concerned about the volume and impact of fake news on the platform. You a...
Probability a negative review came from a lazy reviewer
Bayesian posterior: Did a negative review come from a lazy reviewer? Context and assumptions - Reviewer types in the population: - Lazy reviewers: 2...
Describe Facebook User Comment Distribution Shape and Justification
Characterizing Comments per User on Facebook Context You are analyzing the number of comments made by each user over a fixed time window (e.g., 30 day...