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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?

Choose a classifier decision threshold from calibrated probability, false-positive cost, false-negative cost and operational capacity. The threshold changes when costs, prevalence, calibration or alert budget changes. It also connects cost sensitive learning to the point an interviewer is testing.

6 minmid, senior, staff
hardConcept

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

Class weights, oversampling, undersampling and SMOTE are ways to train on imbalanced data, but none creates new signal. They change loss, sample frequency or geometry, so validation, calibration and threshold choice must be handled carefully. Use this class imbalance answer to show the decision, trade-off, and evidence rather than a memorised definition.

5 minmid, senior, staff