
Below, you will look into a conversation between two friends, one of them just landed a data science job! Let’s call him Abnormal and, the other one who do not know much about this new job profile, but wants to learn. Let’s call her Normal.
Abnormal: Guess what! I got a new job, I am a Data Scientist now 😎.
Normal: Wow, Congratulations! I have always been in doubt what a Data Scientist actually do, Can you tell a bit about it?
Abnormal: Ya sure, a DS generally gathers data from various sources, pre-process them to make it more understandable, gathers insights from the data, tweaks the data to make it more suitable to perform prediction tasks and communicate the ….
Normal: Hold on. I know the overview, Can we go into the details. First tell me how do you collect the data?
Abnormal: It depends on the business requirements and the type of problem you’re trying to solve. It maybe through web scrapping or mining the data warehouse and different OLTPs, etc. Or may be the combination of these sources and merging the data.
Normal(Skeptical): Hmm…Okay how do you pre-process it?
Abnormal: Pre-processing is one of the most important part of the pipeline. It involves Imputation, categorical to numerical, feature selection and extraction, dimensionality reduction, blah blah. But it totally depends the structure of the data, so can’t tell you much about it. You’ve got to practice.
Normal: Ugh! Okay leave it. How do you find insights and useful information?
Abnormal: See, you have to plot some graphs and maybe try to find patterns in the data. You have to conquer the data and it will submit to you! Haha.
Normal: Yeah but how to do that, can you be specific?
Abnormal: Well, that depends on your data.
Normal: I thought we were friends but, you are not helping me.
Abnormal: Hey! I am telling you the best way I can!
Normal: I give you one last chance, I know there are multiple ML algorithms, how do you choose between them?
Abnormal: Well, I don’t choose the model, the data chooses it. Actually….
Normal: Goodbye and never talk to me.
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Abnormal: Damn! What did I say?
