EXPLORING DATA SCIENCE
What Kind of Knowledge Does Data Science Produce?
Apr 29, 2021
Taking a step back from the hum of day-to-day model-training and number-crunching, asks some very big questions in her 2019 post about the types of knowledge data scientists explore — and generate. Starting off with the long-simmering tension between models that predict real-world outcomes and those that seek to explain the causal forces at play, Phoebe suggests that we might not be in either/or territory after all: “predictive and causal models serve very different purposes and require very different data and statistical modeling processes, and often we need to do both.”
