Optimize Predictive Analytics: Feature Engineering to Model Evaluation
Overview
This question evaluates a Data Scientist's end-to-end predictive analytics competency, including problem definition, data sourcing and leakage controls, feature engineering, algorithm selection, evaluation metrics, error analysis, interpretability, and iteration planning within the Machine Learning domain.
Amazon
Jul 12, 2025, 6:59 PM
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Machine Learning
11
0
End-to-End Predictive Analytics Project Walkthrough
Context
You are interviewing for a Data Scientist role. The interviewer asks you to walk through a predictive-analytics project end-to-end. Assume the audience is technical and cares about both modeling quality and business impact.
Prompt
Describe a project where you used statistical or machine-learning techniques to solve a business problem.
Include:
- Problem definition and business objective.
- Data sourcing and labeling (with leakage controls).
- Feature engineering (what you created and why).
- Algorithm selection and rationale.
- Evaluation setup and metrics.
- Error analysis and interpretability.
- Iterations and what you would do differently to improve performance and impact.
Hints
- Cover data sourcing, feature selection, algorithm choice, evaluation metrics, error analysis, and next-step improvements.
- Tie metrics to business decisions (e.g., thresholds under cost/budget constraints).
- Call out guardrails: time-based splits, calibration, monitoring, and bias checks.
Solution
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