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Preptima

Imbalanced & Rare Events interview questions

Fraud and failure-scale imbalance, resampling and class weights, why accuracy is meaningless here, and evaluating at the operating point you will run.

3 questions in Machine Learning.

hard3

hardConceptScenario

How do you choose the decision threshold for a classifier, and what makes it move?

Derive it from the two error costs. Acting is worthwhile when its expected cost falls below the cost of inaction, which gives a threshold of the false-positive cost over the sum of both. With calibrated probabilities that threshold is fixed as prevalence moves; under a fixed alert budget it must move.

6 minmid, senior, staff
hardConcept

Class weights, oversampling, undersampling, SMOTE. What does each one cost you?

None of them adds information. Weights change the loss without touching the data, oversampling duplicates rows and inflates any score computed after it, undersampling discards real observations, and SMOTE interpolates implausible points. All shift the implied prior, so the scores need recalibrating.

5 minmid, senior, staff