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Identify Probability of Request Originating from Bad User

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates probabilistic reasoning and statistical inference skills, specifically application of Bayes' theorem, handling class imbalance and differing activity rates, estimation of event-origin probabilities, and use of observational features for classification within the Statistics & Math domain.

  • medium
  • Meta
  • Statistics & Math
  • Data Scientist

Identify Probability of Request Originating from Bad User

Company: Meta

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Statistics & Math

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

##### Scenario A social-network platform wants to measure and control abuse. Five percent of users are classified as "bad" and, on average, each bad user sends ten times more friend-requests than a good user. ##### Question If 5 % of users are bad and each bad user sends 10× as many friend-requests as a good user, what is the probability that a randomly selected request came from a bad user? Using only existing event logs, propose a method to identify the likely bad users. Given additional features (e.g., request timing, acceptance rate), derive P(good | request) with Bayes’ theorem. If you must shrink the confidence interval of that probability estimate to one-tenth its current width, what changes in data collection or analysis would you make? ##### Hints Apply Bayes rule, reason about class imbalance, increase sample size or variance-reduction, and design behavioral signals.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates probabilistic reasoning and statistical inference skills, specifically application of Bayes' theorem, handling class imbalance and differing activity rates, estimation of event-origin probabilities, and use of observational features for classification within the Statistics & Math domain.

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Meta
Aug 4, 2025, 10:55 AM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Statistics & Math
2
0

Measuring Abuse in Friend-Requests: Bayes, Identification, and Precision

Scenario

A social-network platform wants to measure and control abuse. Five percent of users are classified as "bad" and, on average, each bad user sends 10× as many friend-requests as a good user.

Tasks

  1. Compute the probability that a randomly selected friend-request came from a bad user.
  2. Using only existing event logs, propose a method to identify the likely bad users.
  3. With additional features (e.g., request timing, acceptance rate), write an expression for P(good | request features) using Bayes' theorem.
  4. If you must shrink the confidence interval (CI) of that probability estimate to one-tenth its current width, what changes in data collection or analysis would you make?

Hints

  • Apply Bayes’ rule and reason about class imbalance and different activity rates.
  • Use unsupervised/weakly supervised signals from logs; normalize for exposure (tenure/active days).
  • CI width typically shrinks as 1/sqrt(n); consider variance-reduction techniques.

Solution

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