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Build and evaluate donation propensity model

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in profit-oriented predictive modeling, including conversion and donation-amount modeling, handling sparse and categorical features, calibration and uplift estimation, and offline policy evaluation under selection bias.

  • Medium
  • Capital One
  • Machine Learning
  • Data Scientist

Build and evaluate donation propensity model

Company: Capital One

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: Medium

Interview Round: Onsite

You need a model to maximize expected net revenue from solicitations. Costs: online reach costs $1 per person; gala attendance costs $100 per attendee plus a $20,000 fixed venue cost. Outcomes: probability of donating and donation amount. Tasks: 1) Propose a two-stage model (conversion and amount) or a direct expected-revenue model. Specify features, handling of sparse/categorical variables, leakage risks, and treatment of highly skewed amounts (e.g., log-transform, zero-truncated models). 2) Define the profit-optimized thresholding policy for online (solicit vs suppress) and the invite policy for the gala with capacity 100. Show how you convert predicted probabilities and amounts into expected marginal profit and use it to rank donors. 3) Explain calibration and why it matters for profit optimization; pick a method (e.g., Platt/Isotonic) and an evaluation plot. 4) Describe offline policy evaluation when historical assignments were non-random. Include inverse propensity weighting or doubly robust estimators and the assumptions required. 5) If you instead model uplift (treatment effect) for the online campaign, define the objective, appropriate metrics (e.g., Qini/uplift AUC), and how you would guard against targeting bias that starves low-budget donors of engagement.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in profit-oriented predictive modeling, including conversion and donation-amount modeling, handling sparse and categorical features, calibration and uplift estimation, and offline policy evaluation under selection bias.

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Capital One logo
Capital One
Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Machine Learning
2
0

You need a model to maximize expected net revenue from solicitations. Costs: online reach costs 1perperson;galaattendancecosts1 per person; gala attendance costs 1perperson;galaattendancecosts100 per attendee plus a $20,000 fixed venue cost. Outcomes: probability of donating and donation amount. Tasks:

  1. Propose a two-stage model (conversion and amount) or a direct expected-revenue model. Specify features, handling of sparse/categorical variables, leakage risks, and treatment of highly skewed amounts (e.g., log-transform, zero-truncated models).
  2. Define the profit-optimized thresholding policy for online (solicit vs suppress) and the invite policy for the gala with capacity 100. Show how you convert predicted probabilities and amounts into expected marginal profit and use it to rank donors.
  3. Explain calibration and why it matters for profit optimization; pick a method (e.g., Platt/Isotonic) and an evaluation plot.
  4. Describe offline policy evaluation when historical assignments were non-random. Include inverse propensity weighting or doubly robust estimators and the assumptions required.
  5. If you instead model uplift (treatment effect) for the online campaign, define the objective, appropriate metrics (e.g., Qini/uplift AUC), and how you would guard against targeting bias that starves low-budget donors of engagement.

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