Data Science!
This time I will talk about a trending subject that many people like to talk about online. It is "Data Science".
I know I have promised to do some practical and technical articles and I did not forget about that, trust me ;)
I am currently working on a project and I will be posting a series of R demonstrations of my work (my statistician's graduation thesis) and I will be adding more things along the way.
So, about data Science, It is the new word in the dictionary I guess! Data Science is the thing that a large number of people were doing but someone thought that it would be cool to give it a name, and it was a cool name indeed!
What is Data Science? I don't want to copy/paste Wikipedia's definition here (but you have the link to it so you can check for yourself). I will give you my own vision and my personal understanding of the concept.
You should always remember that I come from a very technical background, as a statistician and data analyst.
So! I will start with a quote from the New York Times about data science:
“This hot new field promises to revolutionize industries from business to government, health care to academia.”
— The New York Times
It's the hot new thing!
I see data science as the activity that involves collecting, cleaning, analyzing, visualizing and delivering the data as a simple useful information. It involves mathematical skills, coding skills and also as an important (very important) part of data science is to have extremely good analytic skills.
There are many ways to preform data science in academic or specially in business applications. I believe that the data scientist is first a visionary, and a strategic thinker. And here is why: we all can learn how to code, we all can take a quick statistics 101 course and we all can call ourselves data scientists.
A good data scientist is someone who spends more time understanding the data, it's structure, the need of the business or the problem he is facing, then coding or calculating anything.
But data science has been around for a long time now under a different name and divided in a number of activities. Mainly in data-mining, statistical analysis, statistical modeling..Etc
I will take the responsibility for my statement here: I personally think that data science is the marketing name someone gave to the work that a statistician do with raw data in all fields. It's the magic we as statisticians do with numbers.
I must say that many data scientist come from computing backgrounds (and others majors too) and they'd be great data scientists .
As I always try to do in all my posts here, you will find some cool links to places that I find interesting to learn about data science and to understand this concept.