Whilst many of us will have come across buzzwords: ‘analytics’ and ‘data science’ in accounts of how sportspeople have used data to their advantage, data and data science are clearly important in other areas of our lives such as business and policy making too.
Put simply, data science is all about making sense of data. This is ‘bread and butter’ to statisticians whose job it is to find and share the information in data. So is data science another term for the science of statistics and are statisticians data scientists? These are just two of the immediate questions that ‘Data Science, Moore’s Law and Moneyball’ a recent piece on Harlan Harris’s blog, has raised for getstats.
Making sense of data, however, is definitely not an exclusive thing. With swathes of new open data in the public domain and more and more of us keen to share in the knowledge that data can offer, are we not, therefore, all really data scientists at heart? and if not, should we be?.
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