Choose clustering for social network users
Company: Meta
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Machine Learning
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Technical Screen
## Scenario
You need to cluster users to discover meaningful groups (e.g., communities, interest groups, or usage segments). You may have:
- Traditional tabular features per user (usage frequency, demographics, embeddings, etc.), and/or
- A **social network graph** (nodes = users, edges = friendships/follows/messages).
## Questions
1. What clustering algorithm(s) would you consider, and why?
2. What are the key differences between **traditional clustering** (feature-vector based) and **social network / graph clustering**?
3. How would you evaluate cluster quality and choose the number of clusters?
4. What practical issues arise at scale (millions of users), and how would you handle them?
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in clustering algorithms and graph analytics within the Machine Learning domain, focusing on grouping users from feature vectors and social network graphs.