Evaluate Home-Feed Diversity's Impact on User Engagement Metrics
Company: TikTok
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
##### Scenario
Pinterest home-feed diversity initiative: posts can belong to topics like animals, recipes, etc.
##### Question
What business benefits can come from increasing home-feed diversity? Propose several quantitative metrics to measure diversity of a user’s feed. For each metric, discuss possible biases and limitations. Consider the metric ‘percentage of posts from the same topic’—what bias does it carry? If you modify the ranking algorithm to improve diversity, design an experiment to test the change and define launch criteria.
##### Hints
Think entropy, Gini, coverage; discuss user satisfaction, engagement, exploration; outline A/B-test design and guardrail metrics.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in product analytics, metric design, bias analysis, and causal experiment design for personalized recommendation systems.