Member-only story

Making Data Useful

Thinking of Becoming a Data Analyst? You’re One Already!

Yes, you.

Cassie Kozyrkov
Towards Data Science
6 min readApr 6, 2022

--

Do you think of yourself as “not a data person”? Or perhaps you’re eager to become a data analyst but you’re worried you’d need to take a course, or worse, a whole PhD degree, just to get started? I’d like to take this opportunity to prove to you that you’re already a data analyst. (Yes, you.)

Let’s begin by analyzing some data together!

This bucket of numbers — er, I mean, matrix — looks dry and difficult to make sense of. And it’s just a tiny piece of the whole thing, which repeats a similar theme 100,000 times.

If you’re breaking out in a cold sweat, that’s because you’re having a perfectly normal human reaction: an attack of boredom. Guess what, you’re right!

This matrix *is* boring.

Context is what makes data interesting

Whoever tells you that data is automatically exciting is either lying or has bizarre proclivities. To make this matrix more interesting, you’d need context. Two broad categories:

  1. Context that makes these numbers useful.
  2. Context that makes these numbers familiar.

--

--

Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

Your home for data science and AI. The world’s leading publication for data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence professionals.

Cassie Kozyrkov
Cassie Kozyrkov

Written by Cassie Kozyrkov

Chief Decision Scientist, Google. ❤️ Stats, ML/AI, data, puns, art, theatre, decision science. All views are my own. decision.substack.com

Responses (8)