11/21/2017 What I Love About Data Science? – Yogesh Malik – Medium

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Yogesh MalikExponential Thinker | Technology Evangelist | Digital FuturistSep 18 · 4 min read

What I Love About Data Science?In 2012, Data Science was ranked as “ The Sexiest Job of the 21st

Century”. Some people have taken this journey and enjoying it too. It is

a journey, not a destination. This discovery of insight from data — you

also need a little dose of curiosity and a longing for lifelong learning.

In last one year I learnt Machine Learning, Data Mining, Data Science

Foundations, Data Visualization for Storytelling and Hadoop for Data

Science ; all along I �nd it interesting and following are the reasons

Ilike Data Science so much

. . .

1 — Context & Diversity

11/21/2017 What I Love About Data Science? – Yogesh Malik – Medium

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It requires multiple domain skills, not just technical skills -but a lot of

contextual skills are needed. Business acumen, good analytical and

statistical skills, maths, programming, research and hacking talent — all

these can be a great foundation.

Most importantly you need to know: — What does your business need?

By when does it need? Do you have enough time, money and people?

Image below depicts the relationship between skills, science and

responsibilities

. . .

2 — ToolsGood thing is — There are variety of tools for programmers and data

scientists that you can use and play with. Once you take a speci�c

problems you will �nd a lot many data science tools that you use, but it

is wise to choose the right tool for the right job.

11/21/2017 What I Love About Data Science? – Yogesh Malik – Medium

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If you are great at programming you have di�erent options and if you

aren’t so good at it, there are equally good tools available to keep your

appetite satis�ed.

Just don’t get overwhelmed by various data science tools, when in

doubt just look at the data and �nd the best way to get started

. . .

3 — Visualization

Your Company could be sitting on a goldmine of data but you just failed

to churn it to bring the real gold (insights from data) to the business

owners then what’s the point of all that data.

https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/data-science-periodic-table

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A good data visualization enables decision makers to identify new

patterns and grasp di�cult concepts, and with interactive tools you can

drill down further and respond to issues quickly

. . .

4 — EthicsIf you are working on any big data research project — be watchful of

various ethical, legal and policy issues. Ask questions like — Who owns

the data? What are the limits on that data? How data will be stored?

Who will access data? Failure to do so could result in real bad situations

Huge amount of personal data that is available to data scientists will

help greatly in medical and scienti�c applications, but the same data

tools can in�uence social and political order of the country.

Overuse of data analytics by media and political agencies, and its

in�uence on citizens might not do any greater good or evil, but just over

ampli�es the message whatever there is. If there is a bias — then

technology just ampli�es it

. . .

5 — SocialBene�ts of data science is revolutionary if you are using it for a social

science project. Growing volume and availability of data, customized

features for social data collection and analysis, are making social

research richer are near real-time.

Unprecedented quantities of social data provide opportunities to study

complex social systems in frameworks, and can be used to generate

predictive models to re�ne our approach to solve social problems.

As the data sets will grow, new data will be added, care should be taken

while considering the reliability and source of social data for any bias

or missing data points.

. . .

11/21/2017 What I Love About Data Science? – Yogesh Malik – Medium

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Though I have not deep-dived much into the technical part of data

science models, but playing with various tools and technologies has

given me enough motivation and raised my appetite to stay on the

course of the mission to learn more on the subject