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

Wrangling data with pandas

Data wrangling is one of the most important topics in data science interviews. For starters, data is often not presented in an analysis-ready format, which makes it necessary for data modeling preprocessing and addressing data quality concerns. Thus, data scientists can spend upward of 80% of their time cleaning and wrangling data [1].

Furthermore, data wrangling skills demonstrate your comfort and fluency with computer programming. Having the ability to use functions, loops, indexing, aggregation, filtering, and forming calculations will serve you well in your data science journey, enabling you to complete work quickly and efficiently. It is also fundamental for extract, transform, load (ETL) activities, querying data, data modeling, descriptive statistics, reporting, and a host of other data tasks.

In this section, we will review a couple of common data wrangling challenges, including handling missing data, filtering data, merging, and aggregating...