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:
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Problem definition and business objective.
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Data sourcing and labeling (with leakage controls).
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Feature engineering (what you created and why).
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Algorithm selection and rationale.
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Evaluation setup and metrics.
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Error analysis and interpretability.
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Iterations and what you would do differently to improve performance and impact.
Hints
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Cover data sourcing, feature selection, algorithm choice, evaluation metrics, error analysis, and next-step improvements.
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Tie metrics to business decisions (e.g., thresholds under cost/budget constraints).
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Call out guardrails: time-based splits, calibration, monitoring, and bias checks.