What is data science?

Data science is the process of extracting actionable insights from large amounts of data using tools like the scientific method, statistics, analytics, programming, and machine learning. The goal is to see patterns in the data that might be missed at a glance, pull useful information from that data, generate predictive insights, and use that information to increase business intelligence (BI) and make better business decisions.

Data science is a broad field with many players. You may hear these three terms used interchangeably to describe the role data science professionals take on in an organization, but they can actually represent different skill sets and requirements. 

Data scientist

A data scientist focuses on questions that need to be answered in order to solve business problems and where the data needed to answer those questions can be found. They are responsible for sourcing, managing, and analyzing high volumes of unstructured data, so they must have the expertise to mine, clean, and present data as well. They communicate their results with decision makers so they can apply insights to their business strategy. They use machine learning to create models for predictive analytics. 

Data analyst

Data analysts can share many of the same responsibilities as data scientists, but usually, they don’t have a background in programming and aren’t responsible for much of the statistical and predictive modeling and machine learning elements of data science. While data scientists determine what questions need to be answered on their own, data analysts are typically given questions to answer by business leaders.

Data engineer

A data engineer focuses more on data architecture, infrastructure, and flow, than on statistics, modeling, and analytics. They are responsible for developing, deploying, managing, and optimizing data pipelines so that data scientists and data analysts can query the data. They need strong programming skills so that they can design databases, oversee data warehousing, and set up data lakes.

Data science and business intelligence

Data science and business intelligence both help organizations make data-driven decisions, but they have some subtle differences. Business intelligence looks at past data to determine trends. Data science can model and predict future outcomes. You could say that while BI looks at the past and present, data science focuses more on the present and the future. 

Why is data science important?

Data science enables and encourages organizations to make better decisions. By following the data science process, you can find the cause of a problem, perform studies on your data to understand the problem, model the data using algorithms to test potential solutions, and communicate your results with descriptive and easy-to-understand visuals like graphs and dashboards. 

What you can do with data science

• Detect anomalies like alerting to fraud
• Classify everything from emails to inventory
• Give recommendations based on past behavior to customers and employees
• Share actionable insights through visualizations, reports, and dashboards
• Automate common processes
• Score and rank items
• Make predictions
• Detect patterns
• Enable recognition for faces, audio, videos, images, and text
• Create forecasts
• Optimize content and processes to manage risks and increase rewards
• Segment products or clientele

How does data science work?

Because data science is such a large field that deals with a variety of tasks, it can be difficult to narrow down exactly how each question is answered. Generally, the data science process, also known as the data science lifecycle, involves these steps:

1. Capture
Data scientists gather raw structured and unstructured data using many different methods from all the relevant sources available. Tasks include: 

• Data acquisition
• Data entry
• Signal reception
• Data extraction

2. Maintain
Data scientists put raw data into a standardized format so that it can be used for analytics, machine learning, and other forms of modeling. Tasks include:

• Data cleansing
• Data processing
• Data staging
• Data warehousing
• Data architecture

3. Process
Data scientists examine the data to find patterns, ranges, and distributions of values and to check for biases. All of this information informs whether or not the data is suitable for predictive analytics, machine learning, and other analytical methodologies. Tasks include:

• Data mining
• Clustering and classification
• Data modeling 
• Data summarization

4. Analyze
Data scientists perform functions to extract insights from the data. Tasks include:

• Predictive analysis
• Regression
• Text mining
• Qualitative analysis

5. Communicate
Data scientists present their findings in data visualizations like reports and charts that make insights easy to understand. They help decision makers understand how findings will impact their business. Tasks include:

• Data reporting
• Data visualization
• Business intelligence
• Decision making