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Data Quality and Anomaly Detection Questions

Focuses on identifying, diagnosing, and preventing data issues that produce misleading or incorrect metrics. Topics include spotting duplicates, missing values, schema drift, logical inconsistencies, extreme outliers caused by instrumentation bugs, data latency and pipeline failures, and reconciliation differences between sources. Covers validation strategies such as data tests, checksums, row counts, data contracts, invariants, and automated alerting for quality metrics like completeness, accuracy, and timeliness. Also addresses investigation workflows to determine whether anomalies are data problems versus true business signals, documenting remediation steps, and collaborating with engineering and product teams to fix upstream causes.

MediumTechnical
81 practiced
For a very high-cardinality keyed dataset, propose a sampling strategy to detect anomalies efficiently without scanning all rows. Describe bias risks, how to preserve rare but important keys, and how you would validate that the sampling approach is trustworthy for alerts.
MediumTechnical
89 practiced
Define concrete SLOs for freshness and completeness for a marketing daily cohort table that marketing needs by 08:00 each day. Propose measurable SLO targets, how to measure them, and acceptable error budgets. Explain how you would notify stakeholders when SLOs are breached.
MediumTechnical
89 practiced
Schema drift: describe a practical process to detect schema drift across daily ingests, how to classify drift as backward-compatible vs breaking, and the mitigation steps (alerting, auto-casting, blocking ingestion). Give examples of safe and unsafe schema changes.
HardTechnical
68 practiced
A schema migration resulted in many NULLs in a critical analytics table. As the data analyst, propose how you would prioritize which missing fields to backfill first. Include SQL queries to measure impact (e.g., downstream dashboard usage, number of dependent models), estimate compute/backfill cost, and a decision rubric combining business impact and technical feasibility.
MediumTechnical
68 practiced
A daily revenue KPI dropped 20% immediately after a new ETL deployment. Explain how you would use data lineage and metadata to trace the KPI back to the upstream source tables and ETL steps that could have caused the change. Include concrete steps and tools or queries you would run.

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