How does the data science test help recruiters screen candidates?

The Data Science Online Test helps recruiters and hiring managers identify qualified candidates from a pool of resumes, and helps in taking objective hiring decisions. It reduces the administrative overhead of interviewing too many candidates and saves expensive engineering time by filtering out unqualified candidates. The Adaface Data Science Test screens candidates for the typical skills recruiters look for in a Data scientist: Expertise with R tools, Python, and machine learning techniques Ability to clean and prepare data for analysis Experience building robust machine learning models Understanding of linear and non-linear regression models Experience with exploratory data analysis and regression analysis Expertise with data visualization tools The insights generated from this assessment can be used by recruiters and hiring managers to identify the best candidates for the role. Anti-cheating features enable you to be comfortable with conducting assessments online. The Data Science test is ideal for helping recruiters identify which candidates have the technical skills to do well on the job.

Data Science Assessment Test

About the test:

The data science assessment test evaluates a candidate's proficiency in statistics, probability, linear & non-linear regression models and their ability to analyze data and leverage Python/ R to extract insights from the data.

Covered skills:

Data Science
Data Visualization
Analytics with R or Python
Data Manipulation
Regression Analysis

Machine Learning Techniques
Data Science Aptitude
Exploratory Data Analysis
Statistics

See all covered skills

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9 reasons why

Adaface Data Science Assessment Test is the most accurate way to shortlist Data Scientists

Reason #1

Tests for on-the-job skills

The Data Science Online Test helps recruiters and hiring managers identify qualified candidates from a pool of resumes, and helps in taking objective hiring decisions. It reduces the administrative overhead of interviewing too many candidates and saves expensive engineering time by filtering out unqualified candidates.

The Adaface Data Science Test screens candidates for the typical skills recruiters look for in a Data scientist:

Expertise with R tools, Python, and machine learning techniques
Ability to clean and prepare data for analysis
Experience building robust machine learning models
Understanding of linear and non-linear regression models
Experience with exploratory data analysis and regression analysis
Expertise with data visualization tools

The insights generated from this assessment can be used by recruiters and hiring managers to identify the best candidates for the role. Anti-cheating features enable you to be comfortable with conducting assessments online. The Data Science test is ideal for helping recruiters identify which candidates have the technical skills to do well on the job.

Reason #2

No trick questions

Traditional assessment tools use trick questions and puzzles for the screening, which creates a lot of frustration among candidates about having to go through irrelevant screening assessments.

The main reason we started Adaface is that traditional pre-employment assessment platforms are not a fair way for companies to evaluate candidates. At Adaface, our mission is to help companies find great candidates by assessing on-the-job skills required for a role.

Why we started Adaface ->

Reason #3

Non-googleable questions

We have a very high focus on the quality of questions that test for on-the-job skills. Every question is non-googleable and we have a very high bar for the level of subject matter experts we onboard to create these questions. We have crawlers to check if any of the questions are leaked online. If/ when a question gets leaked, we get an alert. We change the question for you & let you know.

These are just a small sample from our library of 10,000+ questions. The actual questions on this Data Science Assessment Test will be non-googleable.

🧐 Question
Medium Amazon electronics product feedback	Solve
Amazon's electronics store division has over the last few months focused on getting customer feedback on their products, and marking them as safe/ unsafe. Their data science team has used decision trees for this. The training set has these features: product ID, data, summary of feedback, detailed feedback and a binary safe/unsafe tag. During training, the data science team dropped any feedback records with missing features. The test set has a few records with missing "detailed feedback" field. What would you recommend? A: Remove the test samples with missing detailed feedback text fields B: Generate synthetic data to fill in missing fields C: Use an algorithm that handles missing data better than decision trees D: Fill in the missing detailed feedback text field with the summary of feedback field.
Easy Fraud detection model Logistic Regression	Solve
Your friend T-Rex is working on a logistic regression model for a bank, for a fraud detection usecase. The accuracy of the model is 98%. T-Rex's manager's concern is that 85% of fraud cases are not being recognized by the model. Which of the following will surely help the model recognize more than 15% of fraud cases?
Medium Rox's decision tree classifier Decision Tree Classifier	Solve
Your data science intern Rox was asked to create a decision tree classifier with 12 input variables. The tree used 7 of the 12 variables, and was 5 levels deep. Few nodes of the tree contain 3 data points. The area under the curve (AUC) is 0.86. As Rox's mentor, what is your interpretation? A. The AUC is high, and the small nodes are all very pure- the model looks accurate. B. The tree might be overfitting- try fitting shallower trees and using an ensemble method. C. The AUC is high, so overall the model is accurate. It might not be well-calibrated, because the small nodes will give poor estimates of probability. D. The tree did not split on all the input variables. We need a larger data set to get a more accurate model.
Easy Gradient descent optimization Gradient Descent	Solve
You are working on a regression problem using a simple neural network. You want to optimize the model's weights using gradient descent with different learning rate schedules. Consider the following pseudo code for training the neural network: Which of the following learning rate schedules would most likely result in the fastest convergence without overshooting the optimal weights? A: Constant learning rate of 0.01 B: Exponential decay with initial learning rate of 0.1 and decay rate of 0.99 C: Exponential decay with initial learning rate of 0.01 and decay rate of 0.99 D: Step decay with initial learning rate of 0.1 and decay rate of 0.5 every 100 epochs E: Step decay with initial learning rate of 0.01 and decay rate of 0.5 every 100 epochs F: Constant learning rate of 0.1
Medium Less complex decision tree model Model Complexity Overfitting	Solve
You are given a dataset to solve a classification problem using a decision tree algorithm. You are concerned about overfitting and decide to implement pruning to control the model's complexity. Consider the following pseudo code for creating the decision tree model: Which of the following combinations of parameters would result in a less complex decision tree model, reducing the risk of overfitting? A: max_depth=5, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 B: max_depth=None, min_samples_split=5, min_samples_leaf=5 C: max_depth=3, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 D: max_depth=None, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 E: max_depth=3, min_samples_split=10, min_samples_leaf=10 F; max_depth=5, min_samples_split=5, min_samples_leaf=5
Medium n-gram generator	Solve
Our newest machine learning developer want to write a function to calculate the n-gram of any text. An N-gram means a sequence of N words. So for example, "black cats" is a 2-gram, "saw black cats" is a 3-gram etc. The 2-gram of the sentence "the big bad wolf fell down" would be [["the", "big"], ["big", "bad"], ["bad", "wolf"], ["wolf", "fell"], ["fell", "down"]]. Can you help them select the correct function for the same?
Easy Recommendation System Selection Recommender Systems Collaborative Filtering Content-Based Filtering	Solve
You are tasked with building a recommendation system for a newly launched e-commerce website. Given that the website is new, there is not much user interaction data available. Also, the items in the catalog have rich descriptions. Based on these requirements, which type of recommendation system approach would be the most suitable for this task?
Easy Sensitivity and Specificity Confusion Matrix Model Evaluation	Solve
You have trained a supervised learning model to classify customer reviews as either "positive" or "negative" based on a dataset with 10,000 samples and 35 features, including the review text, reviewer's name, and rating. The dataset is split into a 7,000-sample training set and a 3,000-sample test set. After training the model, you evaluate its performance using a confusion matrix on the test set, which shows the following results: Based on the confusion matrix, what are the sensitivity and specificity of the model?
Medium Green or red balls	Solve
A bag contains 5 red balls, 6 yellow balls and 3 green balls. If two balls are picked at random, what is the probability that both are red or both are green in colour?
Hard Square points and Circle	Solve
What is the probability that two uniformly random points in the square are such that center of the square lies in the circle formed by taking the points as diameter
Easy Frequency distribution	Solve
Convert the following into an ordinary frequency distribution: - 5 users gave less than 3 rating - 12 users gave less than 6 rating - 25 users gave less than 9 ratings - 33 users get less than 12 ratings

	🧐 Question	🔧 Skill
	Medium Amazon electronics product feedback	2 mins Data Science	Solve
Amazon's electronics store division has over the last few months focused on getting customer feedback on their products, and marking them as safe/ unsafe. Their data science team has used decision trees for this. The training set has these features: product ID, data, summary of feedback, detailed feedback and a binary safe/unsafe tag. During training, the data science team dropped any feedback records with missing features. The test set has a few records with missing "detailed feedback" field. What would you recommend? A: Remove the test samples with missing detailed feedback text fields B: Generate synthetic data to fill in missing fields C: Use an algorithm that handles missing data better than decision trees D: Fill in the missing detailed feedback text field with the summary of feedback field.
	Easy Fraud detection model Logistic Regression	2 mins Data Science	Solve
Your friend T-Rex is working on a logistic regression model for a bank, for a fraud detection usecase. The accuracy of the model is 98%. T-Rex's manager's concern is that 85% of fraud cases are not being recognized by the model. Which of the following will surely help the model recognize more than 15% of fraud cases?
	Medium Rox's decision tree classifier Decision Tree Classifier	2 mins Data Science	Solve
Your data science intern Rox was asked to create a decision tree classifier with 12 input variables. The tree used 7 of the 12 variables, and was 5 levels deep. Few nodes of the tree contain 3 data points. The area under the curve (AUC) is 0.86. As Rox's mentor, what is your interpretation? A. The AUC is high, and the small nodes are all very pure- the model looks accurate. B. The tree might be overfitting- try fitting shallower trees and using an ensemble method. C. The AUC is high, so overall the model is accurate. It might not be well-calibrated, because the small nodes will give poor estimates of probability. D. The tree did not split on all the input variables. We need a larger data set to get a more accurate model.
	Easy Gradient descent optimization Gradient Descent	2 mins Machine Learning	Solve
You are working on a regression problem using a simple neural network. You want to optimize the model's weights using gradient descent with different learning rate schedules. Consider the following pseudo code for training the neural network: Which of the following learning rate schedules would most likely result in the fastest convergence without overshooting the optimal weights? A: Constant learning rate of 0.01 B: Exponential decay with initial learning rate of 0.1 and decay rate of 0.99 C: Exponential decay with initial learning rate of 0.01 and decay rate of 0.99 D: Step decay with initial learning rate of 0.1 and decay rate of 0.5 every 100 epochs E: Step decay with initial learning rate of 0.01 and decay rate of 0.5 every 100 epochs F: Constant learning rate of 0.1
	Medium Less complex decision tree model Model Complexity Overfitting	2 mins Machine Learning	Solve
You are given a dataset to solve a classification problem using a decision tree algorithm. You are concerned about overfitting and decide to implement pruning to control the model's complexity. Consider the following pseudo code for creating the decision tree model: Which of the following combinations of parameters would result in a less complex decision tree model, reducing the risk of overfitting? A: max_depth=5, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 B: max_depth=None, min_samples_split=5, min_samples_leaf=5 C: max_depth=3, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 D: max_depth=None, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 E: max_depth=3, min_samples_split=10, min_samples_leaf=10 F; max_depth=5, min_samples_split=5, min_samples_leaf=5
	Medium n-gram generator	2 mins Machine Learning	Solve
Our newest machine learning developer want to write a function to calculate the n-gram of any text. An N-gram means a sequence of N words. So for example, "black cats" is a 2-gram, "saw black cats" is a 3-gram etc. The 2-gram of the sentence "the big bad wolf fell down" would be [["the", "big"], ["big", "bad"], ["bad", "wolf"], ["wolf", "fell"], ["fell", "down"]]. Can you help them select the correct function for the same?
	Easy Recommendation System Selection Recommender Systems Collaborative Filtering Content-Based Filtering	2 mins Machine Learning	Solve
You are tasked with building a recommendation system for a newly launched e-commerce website. Given that the website is new, there is not much user interaction data available. Also, the items in the catalog have rich descriptions. Based on these requirements, which type of recommendation system approach would be the most suitable for this task?
	Easy Sensitivity and Specificity Confusion Matrix Model Evaluation	2 mins Machine Learning	Solve
You have trained a supervised learning model to classify customer reviews as either "positive" or "negative" based on a dataset with 10,000 samples and 35 features, including the review text, reviewer's name, and rating. The dataset is split into a 7,000-sample training set and a 3,000-sample test set. After training the model, you evaluate its performance using a confusion matrix on the test set, which shows the following results: Based on the confusion matrix, what are the sensitivity and specificity of the model?
	Medium Green or red balls	2 mins Probability	Solve
A bag contains 5 red balls, 6 yellow balls and 3 green balls. If two balls are picked at random, what is the probability that both are red or both are green in colour?
	Hard Square points and Circle	3 mins Probability	Solve
What is the probability that two uniformly random points in the square are such that center of the square lies in the circle formed by taking the points as diameter
	Easy Frequency distribution	3 mins Statistics	Solve
Convert the following into an ordinary frequency distribution: - 5 users gave less than 3 rating - 12 users gave less than 6 rating - 25 users gave less than 9 ratings - 33 users get less than 12 ratings

	🧐 Question	🔧 Skill	💪 Difficulty	⌛ Time
	Amazon electronics product feedback	Data Science	Medium	2 mins	Solve
Amazon's electronics store division has over the last few months focused on getting customer feedback on their products, and marking them as safe/ unsafe. Their data science team has used decision trees for this. The training set has these features: product ID, data, summary of feedback, detailed feedback and a binary safe/unsafe tag. During training, the data science team dropped any feedback records with missing features. The test set has a few records with missing "detailed feedback" field. What would you recommend? A: Remove the test samples with missing detailed feedback text fields B: Generate synthetic data to fill in missing fields C: Use an algorithm that handles missing data better than decision trees D: Fill in the missing detailed feedback text field with the summary of feedback field.
	Fraud detection model Logistic Regression	Data Science	Easy	2 mins	Solve
Your friend T-Rex is working on a logistic regression model for a bank, for a fraud detection usecase. The accuracy of the model is 98%. T-Rex's manager's concern is that 85% of fraud cases are not being recognized by the model. Which of the following will surely help the model recognize more than 15% of fraud cases?
	Rox's decision tree classifier Decision Tree Classifier	Data Science	Medium	2 mins	Solve
Your data science intern Rox was asked to create a decision tree classifier with 12 input variables. The tree used 7 of the 12 variables, and was 5 levels deep. Few nodes of the tree contain 3 data points. The area under the curve (AUC) is 0.86. As Rox's mentor, what is your interpretation? A. The AUC is high, and the small nodes are all very pure- the model looks accurate. B. The tree might be overfitting- try fitting shallower trees and using an ensemble method. C. The AUC is high, so overall the model is accurate. It might not be well-calibrated, because the small nodes will give poor estimates of probability. D. The tree did not split on all the input variables. We need a larger data set to get a more accurate model.
	Gradient descent optimization Gradient Descent	Machine Learning	Easy	2 mins	Solve
You are working on a regression problem using a simple neural network. You want to optimize the model's weights using gradient descent with different learning rate schedules. Consider the following pseudo code for training the neural network: Which of the following learning rate schedules would most likely result in the fastest convergence without overshooting the optimal weights? A: Constant learning rate of 0.01 B: Exponential decay with initial learning rate of 0.1 and decay rate of 0.99 C: Exponential decay with initial learning rate of 0.01 and decay rate of 0.99 D: Step decay with initial learning rate of 0.1 and decay rate of 0.5 every 100 epochs E: Step decay with initial learning rate of 0.01 and decay rate of 0.5 every 100 epochs F: Constant learning rate of 0.1
	Less complex decision tree model Model Complexity Overfitting	Machine Learning	Medium	2 mins	Solve
You are given a dataset to solve a classification problem using a decision tree algorithm. You are concerned about overfitting and decide to implement pruning to control the model's complexity. Consider the following pseudo code for creating the decision tree model: Which of the following combinations of parameters would result in a less complex decision tree model, reducing the risk of overfitting? A: max_depth=5, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 B: max_depth=None, min_samples_split=5, min_samples_leaf=5 C: max_depth=3, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 D: max_depth=None, min_samples_split=2, min_samples_leaf=1 E: max_depth=3, min_samples_split=10, min_samples_leaf=10 F; max_depth=5, min_samples_split=5, min_samples_leaf=5
	n-gram generator	Machine Learning	Medium	2 mins	Solve
Our newest machine learning developer want to write a function to calculate the n-gram of any text. An N-gram means a sequence of N words. So for example, "black cats" is a 2-gram, "saw black cats" is a 3-gram etc. The 2-gram of the sentence "the big bad wolf fell down" would be [["the", "big"], ["big", "bad"], ["bad", "wolf"], ["wolf", "fell"], ["fell", "down"]]. Can you help them select the correct function for the same?
	Recommendation System Selection Recommender Systems Collaborative Filtering Content-Based Filtering	Machine Learning	Easy	2 mins	Solve
You are tasked with building a recommendation system for a newly launched e-commerce website. Given that the website is new, there is not much user interaction data available. Also, the items in the catalog have rich descriptions. Based on these requirements, which type of recommendation system approach would be the most suitable for this task?
	Sensitivity and Specificity Confusion Matrix Model Evaluation	Machine Learning	Easy	2 mins	Solve
You have trained a supervised learning model to classify customer reviews as either "positive" or "negative" based on a dataset with 10,000 samples and 35 features, including the review text, reviewer's name, and rating. The dataset is split into a 7,000-sample training set and a 3,000-sample test set. After training the model, you evaluate its performance using a confusion matrix on the test set, which shows the following results: Based on the confusion matrix, what are the sensitivity and specificity of the model?
	Green or red balls	Probability	Medium	2 mins	Solve
A bag contains 5 red balls, 6 yellow balls and 3 green balls. If two balls are picked at random, what is the probability that both are red or both are green in colour?
	Square points and Circle	Probability	Hard	3 mins	Solve
What is the probability that two uniformly random points in the square are such that center of the square lies in the circle formed by taking the points as diameter
	Frequency distribution	Statistics	Easy	3 mins	Solve
Convert the following into an ordinary frequency distribution: - 5 users gave less than 3 rating - 12 users gave less than 6 rating - 25 users gave less than 9 ratings - 33 users get less than 12 ratings

Reason #4

1200+ customers in 75 countries

With Adaface, we were able to optimise our initial screening process by upwards of 75%, freeing up precious time for both hiring managers and our talent acquisition team alike!

Brandon Lee, Head of People, Love, Bonito

Reason #5

Designed for elimination, not selection

The most important thing while implementing the pre-employment Data Science Assessment Test in your hiring process is that it is an elimination tool, not a selection tool. In other words: you want to use the test to eliminate the candidates who do poorly on the test, not to select the candidates who come out at the top. While they are super valuable, pre-employment tests do not paint the entire picture of a candidate’s abilities, knowledge, and motivations. Multiple easy questions are more predictive of a candidate's ability than fewer hard questions. Harder questions are often "trick" based questions, which do not provide any meaningful signal about the candidate's skillset.

Reason #6

1 click candidate invites

Email invites: You can send candidates an email invite to the Data Science Assessment Test from your dashboard by entering their email address.

Public link: You can create a public link for each test that you can share with candidates.

API or integrations: You can invite candidates directly from your ATS by using our pre-built integrations with popular ATS systems or building a custom integration with your in-house ATS.

Reason #7

Detailed scorecards & benchmarks

Reason #8

High completion rate

Adaface tests are conversational, low-stress, and take just 25-40 mins to complete.

This is why Adaface has the highest test-completion rate (86%), which is more than 2x better than traditional assessments.

Reason #9

Advanced Proctoring

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What roles can I use the Data Science Assessment Test for?

Data Scientist
Data Science Engineer
Data Analyst
Machine Learning Engineer
Statistician

What topics are covered in the Data Science Assessment Test?

Supervised learning

Unsupervised learning

Confusion matrix

Gradient Descent

Statistics

Precision

Classification

collaborative filtering

Recall

feature selection

Probability

collaborative filtering

K-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN)

Machine Learning

Naive Bayes

Data Mining

eigenvalues

Classification and regression trees (CART)

Recommendation systems

P-value

Data Visualization

Neural Networks

Numpy

Linear regression

ROC

Exponential distrbution

Decision trees

Pandas

Decision boundary

Normal distribution

Curve fitting

Binomial distribution

SciPy

Baye's Theorem

Poisson distribution

Scikit learn

Cauchy distribution

Multicollinearity

Outliers

Dimension Reduction methods

multivariate analysis

Linear Algebra

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The hiring managers felt that through the technical questions that they asked during the panel interviews, they were able to tell which candidates had better scores, and differentiated with those who did not score as well. They are highly satisfied with the quality of candidates shortlisted with the Adaface screening.

85%

reduction in screening time

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FAQs

What type of questions does the Data Science online test contain?

The Data science test evaluates the on-the-job skill level of candidates with scenario based questions focusing on the candidate's ability to:

Clean data and look for anomalies
Use train/test data and K-Fold cross validation to build robust models
Make predictions using linear regression, polynomial regression, and multivariate regression
Classify data using K-Means clustering, Support Vector Machines (SVM), KNN, Decision Trees, Naive Bayes, and PCA
Read a confusion matrix
Understand the bias/variance tradeoff and overfitting
Use backward elimination, forward selection, and bidirectional elimination methods to create statistical models
Transform independent variables and derive new independent variables for modelling purposes
Check for multicollinearity
Understand and prevent model deterioration

How will the test be customized for senior data scientists?

In addition to the topics mentioned above, tests for senior data scientists also include questions on advanced topics like:

Advanced data manipulation to generate insights from large, unstructured datasets
Feature Engineering
Hyperparameter Tuning
Reinforcement Learning
Dimensionality Reduction
Advanced statistical analysis

Does the data science test evaluate data science aptitude or specific technologies?

The ready-to-use version of this test focuses on data science aptitude- Probability, Statistics & Machine Learning. If you are looking to test for specific technologies, you can request a custom version of this test.

Can I combine multiple skills into one custom assessment?

Yes, absolutely. Custom assessments are set up based on your job description, and will include questions on all must-have skills you specify.

Do you have any anti-cheating or proctoring features in place?

We have the following anti-cheating features in place:

Non-googleable questions
IP proctoring
Web proctoring
Webcam proctoring
Plagiarism detection
Secure browser

Read more about the proctoring features.

How do I interpret test scores?

The primary thing to keep in mind is that an assessment is an elimination tool, not a selection tool. A skills assessment is optimized to help you eliminate candidates who are not technically qualified for the role, it is not optimized to help you find the best candidate for the role. So the ideal way to use an assessment is to decide a threshold score (typically 55%, we help you benchmark) and invite all candidates who score above the threshold for the next rounds of interview.

What experience level can I use this test for?

Each Adaface assessment is customized to your job description/ ideal candidate persona (our subject matter experts will pick the right questions for your assessment from our library of 10000+ questions). This assessment can be customized for any experience level.

Does every candidate get the same questions?

Yes, it makes it much easier for you to compare candidates. Options for MCQ questions and the order of questions are randomized. We have anti-cheating/ proctoring features in place. In our enterprise plan, we also have the option to create multiple versions of the same assessment with questions of similar difficulty levels.