Complete Technical Topics for AI/ML

Interviews
Core Computer Science Fundamentals
Data Structures (Critical Foundation)

Understanding data structures isn't just about memorizing implementations - it's about
recognizing which structure solves specific problems most efficiently. Each structure represents
a different way of organizing information with specific trade-offs between time and space
complexity.

Arrays and Strings

• Dynamic arrays and resizing strategies

• Multi-dimensional arrays and matrix operations
• String manipulation algorithms (KMP, Rabin-Karp, Z-algorithm)
• String matching and pattern recognition
• Array rotation and in-place modifications
• Sliding window techniques on arrays

Linked Lists

• Singly, doubly, and circular linked lists

• Fast and slow pointer techniques (Floyd's cycle detection)
• Merging and splitting linked lists
• Reversing linked lists iteratively and recursively
• LRU cache implementation using linked lists

Stacks and Queues

• Stack-based expression evaluation and parsing

• Monotonic stack applications
• Queue implementations using arrays and linked lists
• Circular queues and deques
• Priority queues and their applications in AI algorithms

Trees and Tree-like Structures

• Binary trees, binary search trees, and balanced trees (AVL, Red-Black)
• Tree traversals (inorder, preorder, postorder, level-order)
• Lowest common ancestor problems
• Tree construction from traversals
• Trie data structure for string processing and autocomplete systems
 • Segment trees and Fenwick trees for range queries
• Decision tree implementations and optimizations

Heaps

• Min-heap and max-heap implementations

• Heap sort algorithm
• Priority queue operations
• K-way merge problems using heaps
• Median finding in data streams

Hash Tables and Hash Maps

• Hash function design and collision resolution

• Open addressing vs separate chaining
• Load factor optimization
• Consistent hashing for distributed systems
• Bloom filters for approximate membership testing

Graphs

• Graph representations (adjacency matrix, adjacency list, edge list)

• Depth-first search and breadth-first search
• Shortest path algorithms (Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, Floyd-Warshall)
• Minimum spanning tree (Kruskal, Prim)
• Topological sorting and cycle detection
• Graph coloring and bipartite matching
• Network flow algorithms
• Union-Find (Disjoint Set Union) data structure

Algorithms (Problem-Solving Patterns)

Searching and Sorting

• Binary search and its variations (lower bound, upper bound)

• Sorting algorithms and their stability properties
• Quick select for finding kth elements
• External sorting for large datasets
• Search in rotated sorted arrays

Dynamic Programming

• Memoization vs tabulation approaches

• Classical problems (knapsack, longest common subsequence, edit distance)
• State space optimization techniques
• Dynamic programming on trees and graphs
 • Advanced DP patterns (digit DP, bitmask DP)

Greedy Algorithms

• Activity selection and interval scheduling

• Huffman coding for data compression
• Fractional knapsack problems
• Graph algorithms with greedy approach

Divide and Conquer

• Master theorem for analyzing recursive algorithms

• Merge sort and quick sort implementations
• Maximum subarray problems
• Closest pair of points problems

Backtracking

• N-Queens problem and variations

• Sudoku solver implementation
• Generate all permutations and combinations
• Graph coloring with backtracking
• Constraint satisfaction problems

Graph Algorithms (Advanced)

• Strongly connected components (Tarjan's algorithm)

• Articulation points and bridges
• Maximum flow and minimum cut problems
• Bipartite matching algorithms
• Traveling salesman problem approaches

String Algorithms

• Pattern matching algorithms (KMP, Boyer-Moore, Rabin-Karp)

• Suffix arrays and suffix trees
• Longest palindromic substring
• String hashing techniques
• Edit distance and sequence alignment

Complexity Analysis

• Big O, Big Omega, and Big Theta notations

• Amortized analysis techniques
• Space-time tradeoff considerations
• Best, average, and worst-case analysis
 • Master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences

Mathematics for Machine Learning

Linear Algebra (Foundation of ML)

Linear algebra provides the mathematical framework for understanding how machine learning
algorithms manipulate high-dimensional data. Every ML algorithm ultimately performs
operations on vectors and matrices.

Vector Operations

• Vector spaces, basis, and linear independence

• Dot products, cross products, and their geometric interpretations
• Vector norms (L1, L2, infinity norms) and their applications in regularization
• Orthogonality and orthonormal bases
• Vector projections and their use in dimensionality reduction

Matrix Operations

• Matrix multiplication and its computational complexity

• Matrix transpose, inverse, and pseudo-inverse
• Determinants and their geometric meaning
• Matrix rank and null space concepts
• Block matrix operations for efficient computation

Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors

• Eigendecomposition and its applications in PCA

• Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and its uses
• Matrix diagonalization techniques
• Spectral analysis of graphs and networks
• Power iteration method for finding dominant eigenvalues

Matrix Factorizations

• LU decomposition for solving linear systems

• QR decomposition for least squares problems
• Cholesky decomposition for positive definite matrices
• Non-negative matrix factorization for topic modeling

Calculus and Optimization

Understanding how algorithms learn from data requires deep knowledge of optimization theory
and calculus.
Differential Calculus

• Partial derivatives and gradients

• Chain rule for composite functions
• Directional derivatives and their interpretation
• Taylor series expansion for function approximation
• Jacobian and Hessian matrices

Multivariable Calculus

• Gradient vectors and their geometric meaning

• Critical points, saddle points, and local minima
• Lagrange multipliers for constrained optimization
• Vector fields and their applications in gradient flow

Optimization Theory

• Convex functions and convex optimization

• Gradient descent and its variants (SGD, Adam, RMSprop)
• Newton's method and quasi-Newton methods
• Constraint optimization (KKT conditions)
• Global optimization techniques

Statistics and Probability

Statistical thinking forms the foundation for understanding uncertainty in data and model
predictions.

Probability Theory

• Sample spaces, events, and probability measures

• Conditional probability and Bayes' theorem
• Independence and conditional independence
• Random variables and their distributions
• Joint, marginal, and conditional distributions
• Expectation, variance, and higher moments
• Law of large numbers and central limit theorem

Probability Distributions

• Discrete distributions (Bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, geometric)

• Continuous distributions (normal, exponential, gamma, beta)
• Multivariate distributions (multivariate normal, Dirichlet)
• Distribution parameters and their estimation
• Transformation of random variables
Statistical Inference

• Point estimation and properties of estimators

• Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)
• Maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation
• Confidence intervals and hypothesis testing
• Type I and Type II errors
• P-values and statistical significance
• Multiple testing correction methods

Bayesian Statistics

• Prior, likelihood, and posterior distributions

• Conjugate priors and their computational advantages
• Bayesian inference and credible intervals
• Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods
• Variational inference techniques

Experimental Design

• A/B testing methodology and analysis

• Sample size calculation and power analysis
• Randomization techniques
• Blocking and stratification strategies
• Causal inference basics

Information Theory

• Entropy and mutual information

• Cross-entropy and KL divergence
• Information gain for feature selection
• Rate-distortion theory basics

Machine Learning Core Concepts

Supervised Learning Algorithms

Each algorithm represents a different approach to learning patterns from labeled data, with
specific strengths and appropriate use cases.

Linear Models

• Linear regression with mathematical derivation

• Regularized regression (Ridge, Lasso, Elastic Net)
• Logistic regression and maximum likelihood estimation
• Polynomial regression and feature engineering
 • Generalized linear models (GLMs)

Tree-Based Methods

• Decision trees and information gain criteria

• Random Forest algorithm and bootstrap aggregating
• Gradient boosting and its mathematical foundation
• XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost implementations
• Tree pruning techniques and overfitting prevention

Instance-Based Learning

• K-nearest neighbors and distance metrics

• Curse of dimensionality in KNN
• Locality-sensitive hashing for efficient similarity search
• Kernel density estimation

Support Vector Machines

• Maximum margin classification principle

• Kernel trick and kernel functions (RBF, polynomial, sigmoid)
• Soft margin SVM for non-separable data
• Support Vector Regression (SVR)
• Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm

Ensemble Methods

• Bagging and variance reduction

• Boosting and bias reduction (AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting)
• Stacking and meta-learning approaches
• Voting classifiers and their combination strategies

Naive Bayes

• Conditional independence assumption

• Gaussian, multinomial, and Bernoulli Naive Bayes
• Laplace smoothing for zero probabilities
• Text classification applications

Unsupervised Learning

Understanding how to find patterns in data without explicit labels requires different
mathematical frameworks.

Clustering Algorithms
 • K-means clustering and initialization strategies
• Hierarchical clustering (agglomerative and divisive)
• DBSCAN and density-based clustering
• Gaussian Mixture Models and EM algorithm
• Spectral clustering and graph-based methods
• Evaluation metrics for clustering (silhouette score, adjusted rand index)

Dimensionality Reduction

• Principal Component Analysis (PCA) mathematical derivation

• Singular Value Decomposition applications
• t-SNE for visualization and its limitations
• UMAP for preserving local and global structure
• Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)
• Independent Component Analysis (ICA)
• Autoencoders for non-linear dimensionality reduction

Association Rule Learning

• Apriori algorithm for frequent itemset mining

• FP-Growth algorithm optimization
• Support, confidence, and lift metrics

Semi-Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning

• Label propagation algorithms

• Co-training and multi-view learning
• Contrastive learning principles
• Pseudo-labeling techniques

Reinforcement Learning Basics

• Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)

• Value functions and policy functions
• Q-learning and temporal difference learning
• Policy gradient methods basics

Deep Learning and Neural Networks

Neural Network Fundamentals

Understanding how artificial neurons combine to create complex learning systems requires both
mathematical and intuitive understanding.

Perceptron and Multi-Layer Perceptrons

 • Single perceptron limitations and linear separability
• Universal approximation theorem
• Forward propagation mathematical computation
• Backpropagation algorithm derivation and implementation
• Vanishing and exploding gradient problems

Activation Functions

• Sigmoid, tanh, ReLU, Leaky ReLU, and their derivatives

• Swish, GELU, and modern activation functions
• Choosing appropriate activation functions for different layers

Loss Functions and Optimization

• Mean squared error for regression tasks

• Cross-entropy loss for classification
• Hinge loss for SVM-style training
• Custom loss function design
• Optimization algorithms (SGD, Momentum, Adam, AdaGrad, RMSprop)
• Learning rate scheduling strategies

Regularization Techniques

• L1 and L2 regularization mathematical formulation

• Dropout and its probabilistic interpretation
• Batch normalization and layer normalization
• Early stopping strategies
• Data augmentation techniques

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)

CNNs represent a specialized architecture designed to process grid-like data such as images, with
built-in translation invariance.

Convolution Operations

• 1D, 2D, and 3D convolutions

• Padding strategies (valid, same, causal)
• Stride and dilation parameters
• Separable and depthwise convolutions
• Transposed convolutions for upsampling

CNN Architectures

• LeNet, AlexNet, and early CNN designs

• VGG networks and deep architecture principles
 • ResNet and skip connections for training very deep networks
• Inception networks and multi-scale feature extraction
• DenseNet and feature reuse strategies
• EfficientNet and neural architecture search

Pooling Operations

• Max pooling, average pooling, and global pooling

• Adaptive pooling for variable input sizes
• Spatial pyramid pooling

Advanced CNN Techniques

• Transfer learning and fine-tuning strategies

• Multi-task learning with shared representations
• Attention mechanisms in vision transformers

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

RNNs handle sequential data by maintaining hidden states that capture temporal dependencies.

Basic RNN Architecture

• Vanilla RNN and its limitations

• Hidden state computations and unrolling through time
• Backpropagation through time (BPTT)
• Gradient clipping techniques

Advanced RNN Variants

• Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture and gating mechanisms

• Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) as simplified LSTM
• Bidirectional RNNs for complete sequence context
• Sequence-to-sequence models for translation tasks

RNN Applications

• Language modeling and text generation

• Sentiment analysis and text classification
• Time series forecasting and anomaly detection
• Speech recognition systems

Transformer Architecture

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing and are increasingly used in
computer vision.
Attention Mechanisms

• Self-attention mathematical formulation

• Multi-head attention and parallel processing
• Positional encoding for sequence order
• Scaled dot-product attention computation

Transformer Components

• Encoder-decoder architecture
• Feed-forward networks within transformers
• Layer normalization and residual connections
• Transformer training strategies and optimization

Modern Transformer Variants

• BERT and masked language modeling

• GPT series and autoregressive generation
• T5 and text-to-text transfer learning
• Vision Transformers (ViTs) for image processing

Generative Models

Understanding how to generate new data samples requires knowledge of probability distributions
and sampling techniques.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)

• Encoder-decoder architecture for generation

• Variational inference and reparameterization trick
• KL divergence in the loss function
• Conditional VAEs for controlled generation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

• Generator and discriminator networks

• Minimax game theory formulation
• GAN training instability and solutions
• Advanced GAN variants (DCGAN, StyleGAN, CycleGAN)

Autoregressive Models

• PixelRNN and PixelCNN for image generation

• WaveNet for audio synthesis
• Language model architectures
Natural Language Processing
Text Preprocessing and Feature Extraction

• Tokenization strategies and handling different languages

• Stop word removal and stemming/lemmatization
• N-gram features and their statistical properties
• TF-IDF vectorization and its mathematical foundation
• Word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText)
• Contextual embeddings (ELMo, BERT embeddings)

Language Models

• Statistical language models and smoothing techniques

• Neural language models and perplexity evaluation
• Transformer-based language models
• Fine-tuning strategies for downstream tasks

Named Entity Recognition and Information Extraction

• Sequence labeling with BiLSTM-CRF

• Rule-based and statistical approaches
• Relation extraction techniques

Machine Translation and Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

• Statistical machine translation basics

• Neural machine translation with attention
• Beam search decoding strategies
• Evaluation metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR)

Question Answering Systems

• Reading comprehension models

• Knowledge graph-based QA
• Retrieval-augmented generation

Computer Vision
Image Processing Fundamentals

• Color spaces and image representations

• Filtering operations (Gaussian, median, bilateral)
• Edge detection algorithms (Sobel, Canny)
• Morphological operations
 • Histogram equalization and contrast enhancement

Feature Detection and Description

• Corner detection (Harris, FAST)

• Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)
• Speeded-up robust features (SURF)
• Oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB)

Object Detection and Recognition

• Sliding window approaches

• Region-based CNNs (R-CNN, Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN)
• Single-shot detectors (YOLO, SSD)
• Feature pyramid networks
• Non-maximum suppression algorithms

Image Segmentation

• Semantic segmentation with fully convolutional networks

• Instance segmentation (Mask R-CNN)
• Panoptic segmentation combining semantic and instance
• U-Net architecture for biomedical segmentation

Advanced Vision Topics

• Optical flow estimation

• Structure from motion and 3D reconstruction
• Face recognition and verification systems
• Medical image analysis techniques

MLOps and Production Systems

Model Development and Experimentation

• Experiment tracking with MLflow, Weights & Biases

• Version control for models and datasets (DVC)
• Hyperparameter optimization (Optuna, Hyperopt)
• Cross-validation strategies for robust evaluation

Model Deployment and Serving

• REST API development with Flask/FastAPI

• Model serialization and deserialization
• Batch vs real-time inference systems
 • Model compression and quantization techniques
• Edge deployment considerations

Monitoring and Maintenance

• Data drift detection algorithms

• Model performance monitoring
• A/B testing for model comparison
• Feature store architecture and management
• Model retraining strategies and triggers

Infrastructure and Scalability

• Containerization with Docker for ML workloads

• Kubernetes for orchestrating ML pipelines
• Cloud ML services (AWS SageMaker, Google AI Platform, Azure ML)
• Distributed training strategies
• GPU optimization and memory management

System Design for ML

Large-Scale ML System Architecture

• Recommendation system design (collaborative filtering, content-based, hybrid)

• Search ranking system architecture
• Real-time bidding system design
• Fraud detection system components
• Personalization system architecture

Data Pipeline Design

• ETL vs ELT pipeline architectures

• Stream processing with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink
• Batch processing with Apache Spark
• Data validation and quality assurance
• Schema evolution and backward compatibility

Performance Optimization

• Model inference optimization techniques

• Caching strategies for ML systems
• Load balancing for ML services
• Auto-scaling based on demand patterns
• Cost optimization in cloud environments
Databases and Data Engineering
SQL and Database Design

• Complex queries with joins, subqueries, and window functions

• Query optimization and execution plans
• Index design and database performance tuning
• ACID properties and transaction management
• Database normalization and denormalization strategies

NoSQL Databases

• Document databases (MongoDB) for unstructured data

• Key-value stores (Redis) for caching and session management
• Column-family databases (Cassandra) for time-series data
• Graph databases (Neo4j) for relationship modeling

Big Data Technologies

• Apache Hadoop ecosystem components

• Apache Spark for distributed computing
• Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming
• Apache Airflow for workflow orchestration
• Data lakes vs data warehouses architecture

Data Processing and ETL

• Data cleaning and validation techniques

• Handling missing data and outliers
• Feature engineering at scale
• Data pipeline monitoring and alerting

Software Engineering Best Practices

Programming Fundamentals

• Object-oriented programming principles

• Design patterns relevant to ML (Factory, Observer, Strategy)
• SOLID principles application in ML codebases
• Code review practices and collaborative development

Testing and Quality Assurance

• Unit testing for ML code with pytest

• Integration testing for ML pipelines
 • Model testing strategies (data validation, model validation)
• Continuous integration for ML projects

Version Control and Collaboration

• Advanced Git workflows for ML teams

• Code branching strategies for experiments
• Collaborative development with Jupyter notebooks
• Documentation standards and API documentation

Security and Ethics

ML Security

• Adversarial attacks and defenses

• Model poisoning and backdoor attacks
• Privacy-preserving machine learning techniques
• Differential privacy implementation

Bias and Fairness

• Bias detection in datasets and models

• Fairness metrics and their trade-offs
• Algorithmic auditing techniques
• Interpretability and explainability methods (LIME, SHAP)

Data Privacy and Compliance

• GDPR compliance for ML systems

• Data anonymization techniques
• Consent management for data collection
• Right to explanation requirements

Cloud Computing and DevOps

Cloud Platforms

• AWS services for ML (EC2, S3, SageMaker, Lambda)

• Google Cloud Platform ML services
• Microsoft Azure ML capabilities
• Cost optimization strategies for cloud ML workloads

Infrastructure as Code

• Terraform for ML infrastructure provisioning

 • Configuration management with Ansible
• Infrastructure monitoring and alerting

CI/CD for ML

• GitLab CI/CD pipelines for ML projects

• Automated testing and deployment
• Blue-green deployment strategies for ML models
• Rollback procedures for failed deployments

This comprehensive list represents the technical foundation you need to succeed in AI/ML
interviews. Each topic builds upon others, creating a interconnected web of knowledge that
enables you to tackle complex real-world problems. The key to mastering these topics lies in
understanding not just the what, but the why and when of each technique. Focus on building
intuitive understanding alongside technical implementation skills, and always be prepared to
discuss trade-offs and alternative approaches during interviews.