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

Using optimizers

At the heart of DL lies the optimization problem: finding the best set of model parameters (weights and biases) that minimize a chosen loss function. Optimization algorithms play a pivotal role in this journey by iteratively adjusting these parameters to reduce errors between predictions and actual target values.

Optimization is a fundamental concept in mathematics that refers to the process of finding the best or most favorable solution among a set of possible solutions. In the context of ML and DL, optimization is used to adjust model parameters to minimize a cost, objective, or loss function (all used interchangeably), leading to improved model performance. We have already covered that the gradient descent algorithm is used for optimization. However, there are different versions of the algorithm, and when constructing your NN, you can choose which of them to use.

Let’s consider some key aspects of optimization:

  • Objective function: Optimization...