This essay was featured as a guest post on Silicon Reckoner. Many thanks to Michael Harris for allowing me the opportunity to share this with his readers.
Just in time for the 2019-2020 interview season, I’m resurfacing posts with interview advice including asking good questions during interviews and preparing interview talks.
Sometimes the term sparse is used to refer to a matrix that has a large fraction of missing entries, but the more typical usage of that term is to refer to a matrix that has a large fraction of zero entries. We instead recommend the term scarce for a large amount of missing data and discuss various scenarios.