You are asked several statistics fundamentals questions in a data science interview:
-
A bank can be organized in one of two ways:
-
System A:
5 tellers share
one common queue
.
-
System B:
5 tellers each have
their own separate queue
.
Assume customer arrivals are random, tellers have similar but not identical service speeds, and some customers take much longer than others. As a customer, which system would you prefer and why? Compare the systems in terms of expected waiting time, variance of waiting time, and fairness.
-
Sketch or describe the distribution of
adult male heights in the United States
and the distribution of
adult female heights in the United States
.
-
If you pool men and women together and ignore sex, what does the
combined height distribution
look like?
-
On a social network such as LinkedIn, describe the distribution of
number of connections per user
.
-
For that connections distribution, how would
mean, median, and mode
compare, and why? If asked for the likely scale of the mean, what factors would determine it?