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Data Quality and Validation Questions

Covers the core concepts and hands on techniques for detecting, diagnosing, and preventing data quality problems. Topics include common data issues such as missing values, duplicates, outliers, incorrect labels, inconsistent formats, schema mismatches, referential integrity violations, and distribution or temporal drift. Candidates should be able to design and implement validation checks and data profiling queries, including schema validation, column level constraints, aggregate checks, distinct counts, null and outlier detection, and business logic tests. This topic also covers the mindset of data validation and exploration: how to approach unfamiliar datasets, validate calculations against sources, document quality rules, decide remediation strategies such as imputation quarantine or alerting, and communicate data limitations to stakeholders.

EasyTechnical
56 practiced
A colleague asks you to define a minimal schema validation checklist for a new financial data feed (fields, types, cardinality, allowed-values). Provide a checklist suitable for the ETL team to run automatically daily, and explain why each item matters to downstream financial models.
MediumTechnical
39 practiced
A source system changed its transaction 'status' codes without notice last week. Describe how you would detect such schema or value set drift automatically, and how you'd design a monitoring rule that both detects and provides actionable context to engineers and finance users.
EasyBehavioral
34 practiced
You must inform stakeholders that a key revenue metric is unreliable due to source data incompleteness. Draft a short outline of the communication you would send: include the summary of the issue, impact assessment on decisions/reports, recommended immediate steps, and proposed timeline to remediation.
HardTechnical
33 practiced
Case study: Your forecasting model has started to systematically overestimate revenue by ~3% after a recent ETL rewrite. Outline an investigative and remediation plan that includes validating input data, model assumptions, ETL transformation differences, test coverage gaps, and stakeholder communications for an upcoming board review.
HardTechnical
39 practiced
You are responsible for integrating a third-party market-price feed into forecasting models. Propose a validation and monitoring strategy for prices: include pre-ingest checks, ongoing freshness checks, distribution checks against historical behavior, and fallback strategies when feed quality degrades.

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