Data science is prevalent in all industries today, given the massive amounts of data produced on a daily basis. If you’re planning to venture into the field of data science, let me tell you that it is one of the most debated topics in the industry these days. Whether you’re looking at big organizations and MNCs, or start-ups and joint ventures, you’ll notice that they have all started implementing data science techniques in order to grow their business. It eventually boils down to customer satisfaction and you’ll see how. In this article, we’ve elaborated on everything you need to know about data science, and what you can do to get started in this field.
What Is Data Science?
To put it in simpler terms for you, data science is the field that uses scientific methods, procedures, algorithms, and systems to extract certain values from the collected data. Data scientists deal with vast volumes of data to find unseen patterns, derive meaningful information, and eventually help in making impactful business decisions. It’s basically the process of receiving raw data, extracting hidden patterns from there, and converting them into useful information that’ll help better an organization’s decision-making process.
Data Science And Its Importance
In this article on everything you need to know about data science, let’s move on to its importance and understand how organizations benefit from it in this era. When does an organization or an agency know that they need to analyze their raw data at a particular time? Let’s put it this way: Data science or data-driven science enables a) Better decision-making, b) Predictive analysis, and c) Pattern discovery and recognition. It lets you do the following:
- Find the leading cause of a problem by asking the right questions
- Perform exploratory study on the data
- Model the data using various algorithms
- Communicate and visualize the results via graphs, dashboards, etc
Unlike data in the traditional systems which was mostly structured, today most of the data is unstructured or semi-structured. That is when the use of complex and advanced analytical tools comes into play when this unstructured data is to be processed, broken down, formatted, analyzed, and re-formatted into necessary information.
Prerequisites For Data Science
Data science, today, has become so important that it is in fact one of the highest paying jobs with competitive salaries and tremendous opportunities. When you’re looking at everything you need to know about data science from a beginner’s perspective, there are certain technical concepts that you will need to learn to proceed further in this field. Elaborating on a few of these things you need to know about data science:
Machine Learning: Consider machine learning as the backbone of data science. Statistics aside, you need to ensure that you have a solid grasp of ML if you’re planning a solid career in this field.
Modeling: When certain data is procured by an organization and handed over to the data analysts and data scientists, there are mathematical calculations and algorithms that are involved. In order to identify these algorithms and calculations that are required to analyze and gather the data, mathematical modeling is crucial. It is a part of ML and helps decide which is the most appropriate algorithm that can not only identify the problem but also solve the given problem.
Statistics: You cannot talk about everything you need to know about data science without mentioning statistics. Statistics are at the core of data science. A sturdy handle on statistics can help you extract more intelligence and obtain more meaningful results.
Programming: A certain level of programming is required in order to execute a successful data science project. The most common programming languages for data science are Python, and R. Python is especially popular because it’s easy to learn, and it supports multiple libraries for Machine Learning.
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Databases: The last, but surely not the least is the art of creating and maintaining databases. As a capable data scientist, you should understand how databases work, how to manage them, and how to extract data from them.
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Who Is A Data Scientist And What Is Their Role?
A data scientist is someone who analyzes the procured data to extract meaningful insights with the help of algorithms and other tools. Here’s the role of a data scientist in everything you need to know about data science:
- Ask the right questions to understand the problem
- Gather data from multiple sources—enterprise data, public data, etc
- Process raw data and convert it into a format suitable for analysis
- Feed the data into the analytic system—ML algorithm or a statistical model
- Prepare the results and insights to share with the appropriate stakeholders
In this data science career guide, you would have noticed that in order to accomplish these tasks, getting familiar with machine learning algorithms is a necessity. It’ll help you understand your data more clearly and will give you a sense of direction or an approach. Quite similar to how Google maps work in directing you towards a particular location!
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