Data Science Motivation

Though data science is not a new topic for few of you, I still see some of my friends and colleagues have some confusion or reservations around this term. Few of the questions I heard from them are:
What is data science? Is this real? Does it work? How is this different to statistics? What is big data? How is it related to data science? How big is big data? What is machine learning? Can only google, amazon, facebook and linkedin do this? Do we need phd? etc., :)

I thought of writing a small post myself answering these question but thanks to Foundations of Data science workshop from SlideRule which has some interesting videos and blog posts which answers these questions. I am listing few articles and videos here.

Firstly, Here is an interesting page from the book “Doing Data science” by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neil.
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/doing-data-science/9781449363871/ch01.html

I believe this page gives a good understanding of what data science is and answers most of the questions i listed above. I did not read this book yet, so I am not in a position to recommend it, but I am looking forward to get a copy of this book soon :)

Secondly, An interesting video from Hilary Mason about Dirty secrets of Data science. In this video the speaker talked about a famous taxonomy of data science called OSEMN.
O:Obtain
S: Scrub
E: Explore
M: Model
N: iNterpret

One final recommendation from me for future data scientists is to go through this prologue by Rachel Schutt. I am really impressed and made me think, “how many of these I ever thought of when aspiring to become a Data scientist”.

https://columbiadatascience.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/next-gen-data-scientists/

I hope this article motivated you and get start with Data Science. Happy learning!!

Credits: Thanks to Slide rule and the original speakers/authors of all the articles and videos referred in this post.