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Build a Bayes classifier for reviewer types

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates Bayesian inference skills, including posterior updating under conditional independence, likelihood modeling for categorical observations, and application of Bayes decision rules with associated false-positive and false-negative rate calculations.

  • medium
  • Meta
  • Machine Learning
  • Data Scientist

Build a Bayes classifier for reviewer types

Company: Meta

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Reviewers are of two types: Lazy (prior 20%) who always give 'Good' reviews, and Careful (prior 80%) who independently give 'Good' with probability 0.60 and 'Bad' with probability 0.40. Assume independence across items conditioned on type. (a) Derive P(review = Good) marginally. (b) Given a particular reviewer produces 3 consecutive 'Good' reviews and no 'Bad', compute the posterior P(Lazy | 3 Good). (c) More generally, derive P(Lazy | g Good, b Bad). (d) Propose a Bayes decision rule that labels a reviewer as Lazy when the posterior exceeds 0.5; find the smallest g (with b=0) that triggers a Lazy label. (e) If each reviewer is observed for exactly N reviews, express the false-positive and false-negative rates of this rule in terms of N.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates Bayesian inference skills, including posterior updating under conditional independence, likelihood modeling for categorical observations, and application of Bayes decision rules with associated false-positive and false-negative rate calculations.

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Meta
Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Machine Learning
0
0
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Bayesian Reviewer-Type Inference

Setup

There are two reviewer types:

  • Lazy (prior probability 0.20): always gives a "Good" review.
  • Careful (prior probability 0.80): independently gives "Good" with probability 0.60 and "Bad" with probability 0.40 on each item.

Assume conditional independence of reviews given the reviewer type.

Tasks

(a) Compute the marginal probability P(Review = Good).

(b) Given a reviewer produces 3 consecutive "Good" reviews and no "Bad", compute the posterior P(Lazy | 3 Good).

(c) Derive the general posterior P(Lazy | g Good, b Bad).

(d) Consider a Bayes decision rule that labels a reviewer as Lazy when the posterior exceeds 0.5. With b = 0, find the smallest g that triggers a Lazy label.

(e) If each reviewer is observed for exactly N reviews, express the false-positive and false-negative rates of this rule in terms of N.

Solution

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