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

Performing feature selection

Feature selection is a critical step in the machine learning pipeline aimed at identifying the most relevant and informative features from the original dataset. By carefully selecting features, data scientists can improve model performance, reduce overfitting, enhance model interpretability, and decrease computational complexity.

Feature selection helps to focus a model on the most impactful features, making it more interpretable and reducing the risk of overfitting. In this section, we will explore scenarios where using all available features can lead to the “curse of dimensionality” and why selecting relevant features is crucial to mitigate this issue.

Types of feature selection

There are three main categories of feature selection techniques:

  • Filter methods: These methods rank features based on statistical metrics such as correlation, mutual information, or variance. They are computationally efficient and independent of...