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

Engineering categorical data and other features

This section will explore the handling of categorical variables in feature engineering for data science and machine learning projects. Categorical variables contain discrete values that represent different groups or categories. Effectively preprocessing and engineering these variables is essential to extract valuable insights and enhance the predictive power of machine learning models. We will dive into various techniques and best practices to transform categorical variables into meaningful numerical representations.

One-hot encoding

One-hot encoding is a popular technique for converting categorical variables into binary vectors. Each category is represented as a binary feature, with a value of 1 if the data point belongs to that category and 0 otherwise. For example, consider a categorical feature, Color, with the categories Red, Blue, and Green. After one-hot encoding, this feature will be split into three binary features –...