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Calculate Posterior Probability of Flagged User Being Bad Actor

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates understanding of Bayesian inference and classifier evaluation metrics, including Bayes' theorem, true/false positive rates, prevalence effects, and confusion-matrix reasoning for detection systems.

  • easy
  • Meta
  • Statistics & Math
  • Data Scientist

Calculate Posterior Probability of Flagged User Being Bad Actor

Company: Meta

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Statistics & Math

Difficulty: easy

Interview Round: Onsite

##### Scenario Platform must distinguish good users from potential bad actors using Bayesian inference while controlling error rates. ##### Question Given a prior probability p of a user being a bad actor and classifier outputs with known true-positive and false-positive rates, derive the posterior probability that a flagged user is truly bad. Define Type I and Type II errors in this context and explain their business impact. If 1 % of 10 million users are truly bad and the classifier has 95 % recall and 2 % false-positive rate, calculate the expected number of bad actors caught and the expected number of good users incorrectly flagged. ##### Hints Apply Bayes’ theorem, build a 2×2 confusion matrix, compute expected counts from prevalence and error rates.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of Bayesian inference and classifier evaluation metrics, including Bayes' theorem, true/false positive rates, prevalence effects, and confusion-matrix reasoning for detection systems.

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Meta
Jul 12, 2025, 6:59 PM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Statistics & Math
105
0

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 = prior probability a random user is a bad actor (prevalence)
  • TPR (recall) = P(flag | bad)
  • FPR = P(flag | good)

Tasks

  1. Derive the posterior probability that a flagged user is truly a bad actor, P(bad | flag), in terms of p, TPR, and FPR.
  2. Define Type I and Type II errors in this context and explain their business impact.
  3. If 1% of 10,000,000 users are truly bad, the classifier has 95% recall and 2% false-positive rate, compute:
    • The expected number of bad actors caught (true positives).
    • The expected number of good users incorrectly flagged (false positives).

Hints: Apply Bayes’ theorem, build a 2×2 confusion matrix, compute expected counts from prevalence and error rates.

Solution

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