Explain ML statistics and model design concepts
Company: Amazon
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Category: ML System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
##### Question
What is a moment generating function and how is it used? Compare exponential and Poisson distributions. Explain statistical distance and statistical difference. Describe the steps of a hypothesis test. State and explain the Law of Large Numbers. What common assumptions underlie machine-learning models? How does multicollinearity affect Random Forests versus XGBoost? How does number of trees impact performance? Define overfitting and methods to prevent it. Name deep-learning models you are familiar with. Compare RNN and LSTM; explain RNN drawbacks and LSTM structure. What is an autoencoder and its use cases? How does the attention mechanism work? Describe the architecture of a CNN. Explain basic principles of causal inference. Design an ML system to identify relevant users.
Quick Answer: Explain ML statistics and model design concepts evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.