Data SCience (DS)

Data science is an inter-disciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data. Data science is related to data mining and big data.

As the world entered the era of big data, the need for its storage also grew. It was the main challenge and concern for the enterprise industries until 2010. The main focus was on building framework and solutions to store data. Now when Hadoop and other frameworks have successfully solved the problem of storage, the focus has shifted to the processing of this data. Data Science is the secret sauce here. All the ideas which you see in Hollywood sci-fi movies can actually turn into reality by Data Science. Data Science is the future of Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, it is very important to understand what is Data Science and how can it add value to your business.

Basic Answers of the following questions

• The need for Data Science.

• What is Data Science?

• How is it different from Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Analysis?

• The life cycle of Data Science with the help of a use case.

Let’s Understand Why We Need Data Science

This is not the only reason why Data Science has become so popular. Let’s dig deeper and see how Data Science is being used in various domains.

• How about if you could understand the precise requirements of your customers from the existing data like the customer’s past browsing history, purchase history, age and income. No doubt you had all this data earlier too, but now with the vast amount and variety of data, you can train models more effectively and recommend the product to your customers with more precision. Wouldn’t it be amazing as it will bring more business to your organization?

• Let’s take a different scenario to understand the role of Data Science in decision making. How about if your car had the intelligence to drive you home? The self-driving cars collect live data from sensors, including radars, cameras and lasers to create a map of its surroundings. Based on this data, it takes decisions like when to speed up, when to speed down, when to overtake, where to take a turn – making use of advanced machine learning algorithms.

• Let’s see how Data Science can be used in predictive analytics. Let’s take weather forecasting as an example. Data from ships, aircrafts, radars, satellites can be collected and analyzed to build models. These models will not only forecast the weather but also help in predicting the occurrence of any natural calamities. It will help you to take appropriate measures beforehand and save many precious lives.

Let’s have a look at the below infographic to see all the domains where Data Science is creating its impression.

Use of the term Data Science is increasingly common, but what does it exactly mean? What skills do you need to become Data Scientist? What is the difference between BI and Data Science? How are decisions and predictions made in Data Science? These are some of the questions that will be answered further.

First, let’s see what is Data Science. Data Science is a blend of various tools, algorithms, and machine learning principles with the goal to discover hidden patterns from the raw data. How is this different from what statisticians have been doing for years?

The answer lies in the difference between explaining and predicting.

Data Science is primarily used to make decisions and predictions making use of predictive causal analytics, prescriptive analytics (predictive plus decision science) and machine learning.

• Predictive causal analytics – If you want a model which can predict the possibilities of a particular event in the future, you need to apply predictive causal analytics. Say, if you are providing money on credit, then the probability of customers making future credit payments on time is a matter of concern for you. Here, you can build a model which can perform predictive analytics on the payment history of the customer to predict if the future payments will be on time or not.

• Prescriptive analytics: If you want a model which has the intelligence of taking its own decisions and the ability to modify it with dynamic parameters, you certainly need prescriptive analytics for it. This relatively new field is all about providing advice. In other terms, it not only predicts but suggests a range of prescribed actions and associated outcomes.
  The best example for this is Google’s self-driving car which I had discussed earlier too. The data gathered by vehicles can be used to train self-driving cars. You can run algorithms on this data to bring intelligence to it. This will enable your car to take decisions like when to turn, which path to take, when to slow down or speed up.

• Machine learning for making predictions — If you have transactional data of a finance company and need to build a model to determine the future trend, then machine learning algorithms are the best bet. This falls under the paradigm of supervised learning. It is called supervised because you already have the data based on which you can train your machines. For example, a fraud detection model can be trained using a historical record of fraudulent purchases.

• Machine learning for pattern discovery — If you don’t have the parameters based on which you can make predictions, then you need to find out the hidden patterns within the dataset to be able to make meaningful predictions. This is nothing but the unsupervised model as you don’t have any predefined labels for grouping. The most common algorithm used for pattern discovery is Clustering.
  Let’s say you are working in a telephone company and you need to establish a network by putting towers in a region. Then, you can use the clustering technique to find those tower locations which will ensure that all the users receive optimum signal strength.

Let’s see how the proportion of above-described approaches differ for Data Analysis as well as Data Science. As you can see in the image below, Data Analysis includes descriptive analytics and prediction to a certain extent. On the other hand, Data Science is more about Predictive Causal Analytics and Machine Learning.

As you can see in the above image, you need to acquire various hard skills and soft skills. You need to be good at statistics and mathematics to analyze and visualize data. Needless to say, Machine Learning forms the heart of Data Science and requires you to be good at it. Also, you need to have a solid understanding of the domain you are working in to understand the business problems clearly. Your task does not end here. You should be capable of implementing various algorithms which require good coding skills. Finally, once you have made certain key decisions, it is important for you to deliver them to the stakeholders. So, good communication will definitely add brownie points to your skills.

I urge you to see this Data Science video tutorial that explains what is Data Science and all that we have discussed in the blog. Go ahead, enjoy the video and tell me what you think.

Basic Data Science : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3paOmcrTjQ

Best Paid Course: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/introduction-data-science

Edx Courses : https://www.edx.org/course/subject/data-science