Book Image

Cracking the Data Science Interview

By : Leondra R. Gonzalez, Aaren Stubberfield
Book Image

Cracking the Data Science Interview

By: Leondra R. Gonzalez, Aaren Stubberfield

Overview of this book

The data science job market is saturated with professionals of all backgrounds, including academics, researchers, bootcampers, and Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) graduates. This poses a challenge for companies seeking the best person to fill their roles. At the heart of this selection process is the data science interview, a crucial juncture that determines the best fit for both the candidate and the company. Cracking the Data Science Interview provides expert guidance on approaching the interview process with full preparation and confidence. Starting with an introduction to the modern data science landscape, you’ll find tips on job hunting, resume writing, and creating a top-notch portfolio. You’ll then advance to topics such as Python, SQL databases, Git, and productivity with shell scripting and Bash. Building on this foundation, you'll delve into the fundamentals of statistics, laying the groundwork for pre-modeling concepts, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI. The book concludes by offering insights into how best to prepare for the intensive data science interview. By the end of this interview guide, you’ll have gained the confidence, business acumen, and technical skills required to distinguish yourself within this competitive landscape and land your next data science job.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Breaking into the Data Science Field
4
Part 2: Manipulating and Managing Data
10
Part 3: Exploring Artificial Intelligence
16
Part 4: Getting the Job

Applying data transformations

Data transformations are vital steps in the data preparation journey. It ensures that data is prepped for data models with unique assumptions. This is achieved by transforming data from its current shape (or distribution) to another.In other words, transforming data from the empirical distribution to theoretical distributions.

In some cases, we need to transform our input variables to ensure that they’re interpretable by the machine learning algorithm. An input variable (also known as a feature) is the columns of data, which typically explain some attribute of the data. In other cases, machine learning models require your output (aka a response) variable to have a certain distribution. An output variable is the column that we are trying to predict.

It certainly would be nice if the world accommodated our needs, but real-world data comes in all varieties! To remedy this scenario, you may have to perform a data transformation. In this section...