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Choose threshold under asymmetric costs

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates cost-sensitive classification, operating-threshold selection, score calibration, drift monitoring, and experiment and guardrail design competencies within the Machine Learning domain.

  • Medium
  • Meta
  • Machine Learning
  • Data Scientist

Choose threshold under asymmetric costs

Company: Meta

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: Medium

Interview Round: Onsite

You own a credit-card fraud classifier deployed as a probability scorer. Choose an operating threshold under asymmetric costs and justify it quantitatively. Assume per 1,000,000 transactions: base fraud rate = 0.20%. Costs: False Positive (decline a good transaction) = $15; False Negative (missed fraud) = $100. Consider three candidate thresholds with the following operating points on a representative validation set: - T1: TPR = 0.90, FPR = 0.020 - T2: TPR = 0.80, FPR = 0.010 - T3: TPR = 0.65, FPR = 0.004 Tasks: - For each threshold, compute the expected number of TP, FP, FN, TN and the expected total cost. Pick the threshold that minimizes expected cost and explain the business trade-offs. - Explain how you would calibrate scores (e.g., Platt/Isotonic), monitor for dataset/label drift, and periodically re-tune the threshold by segment (country, merchant category, transaction amount). - Propose guardrail metrics to detect harmful side effects (e.g., surge in declines for high-LTV users) and an experiment to validate changes without causing unacceptable customer pain.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates cost-sensitive classification, operating-threshold selection, score calibration, drift monitoring, and experiment and guardrail design competencies within the Machine Learning domain.

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Meta
Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Machine Learning
3
0

You own a credit-card fraud classifier deployed as a probability scorer. Choose an operating threshold under asymmetric costs and justify it quantitatively. Assume per 1,000,000 transactions: base fraud rate = 0.20%. Costs: False Positive (decline a good transaction) = 15;FalseNegative(missedfraud)=15; False Negative (missed fraud) = 15;FalseNegative(missedfraud)=100. Consider three candidate thresholds with the following operating points on a representative validation set:

  • T1: TPR = 0.90, FPR = 0.020
  • T2: TPR = 0.80, FPR = 0.010
  • T3: TPR = 0.65, FPR = 0.004 Tasks:
  • For each threshold, compute the expected number of TP, FP, FN, TN and the expected total cost. Pick the threshold that minimizes expected cost and explain the business trade-offs.
  • Explain how you would calibrate scores (e.g., Platt/Isotonic), monitor for dataset/label drift, and periodically re-tune the threshold by segment (country, merchant category, transaction amount).
  • Propose guardrail metrics to detect harmful side effects (e.g., surge in declines for high-LTV users) and an experiment to validate changes without causing unacceptable customer pain.

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