Design Push-Notification System for Airport Surge Pricing

Q: Design Push-Notification System for Airport Surge Pricing

This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in designing ML-driven real-time decision systems, covering feature engineering, predictive modeling for supply–demand imbalance, budgeted ranking for notifications, and operational constraints like per-driver throttling; it is categorized under Machine Learning for a Data Scientist role.

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Question

Designing Airport Surge Push Notifications for Drivers

Context

You are building a real-time system for a ride-hailing platform. When an airport experiences a surge (passenger demand exceeds available drivers), the system should decide:

How many drivers to notify (the "budget").
Which specific drivers to notify (the "ranking").

Assume you have real-time telemetry for drivers, trips, and demand forecasts, and you can send push notifications with per-driver throttling.

Task

Outline a system to determine how many drivers to target and which drivers to include when airport surge pricing occurs.
Explain why a simple distance-radius rule (e.g., notify anyone within 10 miles) can perform poorly, and propose improvements.
Besides ETA, list additional features/metrics you would engineer to decide whether to send a notification.
If neighborhood-level supply–demand imbalance is predictive, describe how you would detect whether a region is imbalanced enough to trigger a notification.

Hints

Discuss feature engineering, predictive modeling, supply–demand signals, real-time data, and model evaluation.

Design Push-Notification System for Airport Surge Pricing

Designing Airport Surge Push Notifications for Drivers

Context

Task

Hints

Solution

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