Hi there,

next week I'll have my first interview for the position. It's a phone interview with a Senior Applied Scientist.

I've heard that especially Amazon is very particular about their behavioral questions. How can I prepare for it? Do I have to follow strictly their principles like "customer obsession" etc. a? Are there any good ressources for it?

It's my first interview for that position. Should I expect mostly:

• a casual walk through my CV and recent projects?

• coding/leetcode styled questions or hands on coding (data cleaning, modeling etc.)?

I really don't know what to expect/what to focus on. Would you share your experiences? I would assume that a Senior Applied Scientist would not care too much about the behavioral stuff and focus more on the technical details, but I could be totally wrong.

Edit: It was purely technical.

I've been trying to learn some fundamentals of data science and machine learning recently when I ran into this medium article about Amazon interview questions. I think I can answer some of the ML and probability questions but others just fly off the top of my head. What do you all think ?

• How does a logistic regression model know what the coefficients are?

• Difference between convex and non-convex cost function; what does it mean when a cost function is non-convex?

• Is random weight assignment better than assigning same weights to the units in the hidden layer?

• Given a bar plot and imagine you are pouring water from the top, how to qualify how much water can be kept in the bar chart?

• What is Overfitting?

• How would the change of prime membership fee would affect the market?

• Why is gradient checking important?

• Describe Tree, SVM, Random forest and boosting. Talk about their advantage and disadvantages.

• How do you weight 9 marbles three times on a balance scale to select the heaviest one?

• Find the cumulative sum of top 10 most profitable products of the last 6 month for customers in Seattle.

• Describe the criterion for a particular model selection. Why is dimension reduction important?

• What are the assumptions for logistic and linear regression?

• If you can build a perfect (100% accuracy) classification model to predict some customer behaviour, what will be the problem in application?

• The probability that item an item at location A is 0.6 , and 0.8 at location B. What is the probability that item would be found on Amazon website?

• Given a ‘csv’ file with ID and Quantity columns, 50million records and size of data as 2 GBs, write a program in any language of your choice to aggregate the QUANTITY column.

• Implement circular queue using an array.

• When you have a time series data by monthly, it has large data records, how will you find out significant difference between this month and previous months values?

• Compare Lasso and Ridge Regression.

• What’s the difference between MLE and MAP inference?

• Given a function with inputs — an array with N randomly sorted numbers, and an int K, return output in an array with the K largest numbers.

• When users are navigating through the Amazon website, they are performing several actions. What is the best way to model if their next action would be a purchase?

• Estimate the disease probability in one city given the probability is very low national wide. Randomly asked 1000 person in this city, with all negative response(NO disease). What is the probability of disease in this city?

• Describe SVM.

• How does K-means work? What kind of distance metric would you choose? What if different features have different dynamic range?

• What is boosting?

• How many topic modeling techniques do you know of?

• Formulate LSI and LDA techniques.

• What are generative and discriminative algorithms? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Which type of algorithms are usually used and why?”