Design a battery-life predictor and cold-start strategy

Quick Overview

This question evaluates time-to-empty (TTE) prediction and related competencies including time-series forecasting, feature engineering, cold-start model transfer, uncertainty quantification, offline evaluation design, and post-launch monitoring within the Machine Learning domain.

Design a battery-life predictor and cold-start strategy

Company: Google

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Technical Screen

You are building a per-device time-to-empty predictor for smartphones. You receive minute-level telemetry with columns: device_id, model, t_minute, soc_percent (0–100), screen_on (0/1), brightness_pct, cpu_util, temp_c, net_type, app_fg_cat, charging (0/1), battery_health_days, ambient_lux. For a specific device at now (soc_percent=37), estimate minutes until 0%. Requirements: - Baseline: implement a piecewise linear interpolation using only this session’s discharge curve; handle irregular timestamps, short charging interludes (charging=1), and screen-off stretches. Define precisely how you exclude/merge segments and how you interpolate t at soc=37 and soc=0. - Feature design: name at least 8 additional covariates you would engineer (e.g., recent discharge slope, duty-cycle features, thermal state, user activity mix) and specify the expected direction of their effect on time-to-empty. - Cold start: when this exact model has no history, propose a similarity-based approach (e.g., hierarchical model across device families, metric-learning + kNN on [model, battery_health_days, usage_mix], or meta-learning) to transfer priors. Define the similarity metric, how you combine neighbors’ curves, and how you quantify uncertainty (prediction intervals or quantile loss). - Evaluation: define an offline protocol using session-level folds; choose primary and secondary metrics (e.g., MAE, P50/P90 absolute error) and guardrails to bound underestimation risk (e.g., P95 underprediction <= X minutes). Explain how you’d weight errors by remaining capacity. - Post-launch: describe monitoring for distribution shift (e.g., drift in discharge slope, ambient temperature) and an automatic recalibration procedure (e.g., isotonic regression or online Platt scaling on recent residuals).

Quick Answer: This question evaluates time-to-empty (TTE) prediction and related competencies including time-series forecasting, feature engineering, cold-start model transfer, uncertainty quantification, offline evaluation design, and post-launch monitoring within the Machine Learning domain.

|Home/Machine Learning/Google
Google logo
Google
Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
hardData ScientistTechnical ScreenMachine Learning
19
0

Smartphone Time-to-Empty (TTE) Prediction — Baseline, Features, Cold Start, Evaluation, and Monitoring

Context

You are building a per-device predictor of minutes until the battery reaches 0% state-of-charge (SoC). Telemetry arrives at minute-level with the following columns:

  • device_id, model
  • t_minute (timestamp in minutes)
  • soc_percent ∈ [0, 100]
  • screen_on ∈ {0, 1}
  • brightness_pct ∈ [0, 100]
  • cpu_util ∈ [0, 1]
  • temp_c (device temperature, °C)
  • net_type (e.g., wifi, LTE, 5G)
  • app_fg_cat (foreground app category)
  • charging ∈ {0, 1}
  • battery_health_days (age proxy)
  • ambient_lux

For a specific device at “now” with soc_percent = 37, estimate minutes until 0%. Assume we evaluate offline using full-session data but make clear how you would operate online (i.e., at a moment in time without future data).

Tasks

  1. Baseline: Implement a piecewise-linear interpolation using only this session’s discharge curve. Handle irregular timestamps, short charging interludes (charging = 1), and screen-off stretches. Define precisely how you exclude/merge segments and how you interpolate t at soc = 37 and soc = 0.
  2. Feature design: Name at least 8 additional covariates to engineer (e.g., recent discharge slope, duty-cycle features, thermal state, user activity mix) and specify the expected direction of their effect on time-to-empty.
  3. Cold start: When this exact model has no history, propose a similarity-based approach (e.g., hierarchical model across device families, metric-learning + kNN on [model, battery_health_days, usage_mix], or meta-learning) to transfer priors. Define the similarity metric, how you combine neighbors’ curves, and how you quantify uncertainty (prediction intervals or quantile loss).
  4. Evaluation: Define an offline protocol using session-level folds; choose primary and secondary metrics (e.g., MAE, P50/P90 absolute error) and guardrails to bound underestimation risk (e.g., P95 underprediction ≤ X minutes). Explain how you’d weight errors by remaining capacity.
  5. Post-launch: Describe monitoring for distribution shift (e.g., drift in discharge slope, ambient temperature) and an automatic recalibration procedure (e.g., isotonic regression or online Platt scaling on recent residuals).
Loading comments...