What are the most asked data analysts’ interview questions?

Angela Kristin
3 min readApr 12, 2022

Data analytics is an emerging discipline, and it is becoming mainstream among the commercial entities of our times. As data is known for granting the ability of predictions. More the data, the more accurate predictions can be derived. Thanks to the abundance of generated data it is sometimes humanly impossible to structure and analyze the data. Thus modern data scientists deploy machine learning and automation tools for handling the data. For this very reason, data analysts’ interview questions revolve around programming, automation and machine learning. Automation, machine learning and data science are thus among essential components for modern data analytics courses. Apart from that, employers are reluctant to hire employees with no hands-on experience. In order to evade the risk of a non-productive hire, employers tend to hire the ones with experience. This interview question for a typical data analytics interview is bound to be related to actual real-life scenarios. Hence, a candidate able to strike a balance between bookish and hands-on knowledge can croon an interview and land the dream job. This article is dedicated to helping those about to set out on a job search.

What are the differences between data mining and data profiling?

Data mining involves the study of associations of a certain genre of data with other aspects of the data set and other genres of data. Data mining involves the analysis of large datasets and figuring out dependencies, clustering and other patterns present in a data set.

Data profiling concentrates on individual aspects of data. Aspects like frequencies and occurrence, quantity and quality are the key features that come under consideration. Data profiling also involves analyzing metadata and figuring out the unique and individual features of the same.

What are the most utilized analytics tools?

Knowing about most data analytics tools can really help an analyst as the circumstances they come across requires improvisation. And only with the necessary knowledge in possession can a data analyst take up challenges needing improvisation and rapid changes of plan. Thus this question is one of the most asked and the answer is expected to cover most of the tools an organization needs for handling the changing commercial circumstances.

● Hadoop
● Spark
● Hive
● Scala
● Flume
● Mahut
● Knime
● Rapidminer
● Google fusion tables
● Openrefine
● Tableau, etc.

What are the popular python libraries aligned with data science needs?

Python is arguably the most aligned language with the needs of a data scientist. It is easy to understand and utilize python due to the similarity of its syntax with actual written language. Thus it is easy to learn python and the python community is also huge. Thus it is not a problem to get the necessary guidance when needed.

● NumPy
● Bokeh
● Matplotlib
● Pandas
● SciPy
● Scikit. etc

A brief description of the data analytics process -

● Data accumulation

Data is abundant today and there are a plethora of sources from which we can obtain the data. Most of the tie the data needed for commercial ventures and market research is available free of cost or made available through subscriptions. But many sources demand periodic payments and even permission of authorities before granting access.

● Data structuring

The obtained data is never grouped, formatted or even structured. A data scientist or analyst is responsible for the grouping and structuring of the data. As the humanly impossible calculations need machine learning or automation support and those tools can not be deployed on unstructured data sets. Thus in order to take up huge tasks with data analytics, an analyst must know how to make the available data suitable for machine learning and automation applications.

● Data analysis

Data analysis is basically a statistical approach to making sense of seemingly unrelated or maybe related data. The utilization of data is automated often depending on the size of the data set.

● Analysis representation

The representation of data analysis results is the most crucial if the goodness of the same is to be delivered. Thus the representation should be fairly graphic and formatted in a way that anyone can understand. In the case of data analysts’ interview questions, interviewers can ask to present a certain analysis with the help of charts and representation tools. Thus only the most experienced will definitely stand out and land the job.

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