Machine Learning Interview Questions (Basic to Advanced)
Basic ML Interview Questions
1. What is the difference between AI, ML, and Deep Learning?
2. What is supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning?
3. What is overfitting and underfitting? How to avoid them?
4. Explain bias-variance trade-off.
5. What are features and labels in a dataset?
6. Explain how linear regression works.
7. What is the difference between regression and classification?
8. What is logistic regression? Why is it called regression?
9. What is a decision tree? When do you prefer it?
10. What is KNN and how does it work?
11. Why do we scale/normalize data?
12. What is one-hot encoding?
13. How do you handle missing values in data?
Intermediate ML Interview Questions
14. What is cross-validation? Why is it used?
15. What are precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy?
16. When to use ROC curve vs PR curve?
17. What is AUC-ROC?
18. How does SVM work? What is the kernel trick?
19. What is the intuition behind Naive Bayes?
20. Explain the working of Random Forest.
21. What is the difference between bagging and boosting?
22. How do you handle imbalanced datasets?
23. What is feature selection and why is it important?
24. What is dimensionality reduction? PCA explained intuitively.
25. What are hyperparameters? How do you tune them?
Advanced ML Interview Questions
26. What is the difference between a neuron and a perceptron?
27. Explain backpropagation.
28. What are activation functions and why are they needed?
29. Difference between batch, epoch, and iteration?
30. What is the vanishing gradient problem?
31. How does XGBoost work? How is it different from Random Forest?
32. What is regularization (L1 vs L2)? How do they impact models?
33. Explain ensemble methods with examples.
34. What is attention mechanism in NLP?
35. What is transfer learning?
36. Derive the cost function for linear regression.
37. What is convexity in optimization? Why is it important?
38. What is the Curse of Dimensionality?
39. Explain eigenvalues and eigenvectors in the context of PCA.
40. What are Markov chains?
Real-world & Scenario-based Questions
41. You're working on a model with 95% accuracy but poor recall. What would you do?
42. How do you choose the right model for a problem?
43. How do you explain your model to a non-technical stakeholder?
44. What metrics would you track in a fraud detection system?
45. How would you deploy a machine learning model to production?