What in the %^&* is data science?

sarcastech:

Remember when you took statistics back in high school? That class was not so awesome, right? Well guess what? Its back with a new name and a cool new marketing campaign.

Sure python and R didn’t exist back then. And you had to run all of your tests on a TI-83 (if you were lucky). But you were basically doing the same thing then that “data scientists” are doing today. Due to the wonders of internet marketing + the power of articles about sexiest professions of the 21st century, statistics is making a serious comeback. 

If you are a finance guy, like me, you might have heard of stochastic calculus or something like that. You know, some probabilistic method for determining outcomes of a particular security. Wait? Is that predictive analytics? Maybe.

But you might say - hey all this new stuff like deep neural networks and recommendation engines didn’t exist back then. And you would be right. But the theories and algorithms that make them possible did (for the most part). Bayesian statistics are a core piece of machine learning - and they weren’t first discussed in 2015. 

So how do we mentally deal with the fact that a topic in discrete mathematics that was once considered insanely boring is now like massively cool?

First, you could just accept it and learn some python or maybe even download TensorFlow! That would be a good start. Then you can read up on machine learning or maybe create your own convolutional neural network using your 5,000 node GPU cluster in your backyard. Well, that might be stretching it. 

It doesn’t take much to jump on the bandwagon though. Data science is just a rehashing of one of the most difficult questions that mathematics, computer science, and physics have always pondered? What is going to happen in the future? You know that R squared stuff - its all about the future. Statistically significant- future. Six Sigma - future. Basically statistics helps us predict the future. And data science does the same thing, except it looks so much better while its doing it. 

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