Scenario
You must choose and tune models for (a) forecasting marketplace demand with seasonality and trend, and (b) detecting fraud where the positive class rate is only 0.2%.
Tasks
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Ordinary Least Squares (OLS): Explain how OLS linear regression works and list its key assumptions.
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Tree Ensembles: Compare gradient-boosted trees, random forests, and bagging. When would you prefer each?
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Class Imbalance (0.2% positive): How would you handle this imbalance during model training and evaluation?
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Time-Series Forecasting Workflow: Describe a full, practical workflow for modeling a series with trend and seasonality, including preprocessing, feature engineering, appropriate metrics, and time-aware cross-validation.
Hint
Address data preprocessing, feature engineering, resampling/weighting, proper metrics for imbalance, and cross-validation suited for temporal data.