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Design Push-Notification System for Airport Surge Pricing

UpstartData Scientist · Technical Screen
MediumData ScientistTechnical ScreenMachine Learning

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Design Push-Notification System for Airport Surge Pricing evaluates core ML concepts, assumptions, math intuition, training/evaluation trade-offs, and practical failure modes in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

Scenario

Airport surge pricing push notifications: deciding which drivers to notify when supply < demand

Question

How would you design a push-notification ranking system that determines how many drivers to target and which drivers to include when airport surge pricing occurs? Why could a simple distance-radius rule perform poorly, and what improvements would you propose? Besides ETA, which additional features or metrics would you engineer to decide whether to send a notification? If neighborhood supply-demand imbalance may be predictive, how would you detect whether a region is imbalanced enough to trigger a notification?

Hints

Discuss feature engineering, predictive modeling, supply-demand signals, real-time data, model evaluation.