Data & Machine Learning

Model Evaluation

9 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.

  • Why do we split data into training, validation, and test sets, and what is each one used for? Junior level
  • Your classifier reports 97% accuracy but stakeholders say it's useless for catching fraud. What's going on, and how would you evaluate it properly?Go Pro Junior level
  • You're evaluating a fraud classifier where only about 1% of transactions are fraudulent. The team is reporting 99% accuracy. What's wrong with leading on that metric, and which metrics would you actually use to judge the model?Go Pro Senior level
  • Walk me through the precision-recall tradeoff and how you'd pick a decision threshold for a binary classifier in a real product.Go Pro Mid level
  • Once you've trained a binary classifier that outputs probabilities, how do you choose the decision threshold for production, and when do the raw probabilities themselves need attention before you can trust that threshold?Go Pro Senior level
  • Explain the difference between precision and recall. When would you prioritise one over the other?Go Pro Junior level
  • You've built a recommendation model and its offline ranking metrics look great, but a colleague warns that offline numbers won't predict the online lift. How do you evaluate a model whose own decisions shape the data it's scored on, and reason about why offline and online results diverge?Go Pro Senior level
  • How do you decide which evaluation metric to use when presenting a model to a business stakeholder?Go Pro Mid level
  • A stakeholder asks you to add five new features to the model next sprint. How do you evaluate whether to include them?Go Pro Mid level
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