Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, Data model, or unstructured data.
Data science also integrates domain knowledge from the underlying application domain (e.g., natural sciences, information technology, and medicine). Data science is multifaceted and can be described as a science, a research paradigm, a research method, a discipline, a workflow, and a profession.
Data science is "a concept to unify statistics, data analysis, informatics, and their related methods" to "understand and analyze actual phenomena" with data. It uses techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the context of mathematics, statistics, computer science, information science, and domain knowledge. However, data science is different from computer science and information science. Turing Award winner Jim Gray imagined data science as a "fourth paradigm" of science (empirical, Basic research, computational, and now data-driven) and asserted that "everything about science is changing because of the impact of information technology" and the data deluge.
A data scientist is a professional who creates programming code and combines it with statistical knowledge to summarize data.
Vasant Dhar writes that statistics emphasizes quantitative data and description. In contrast, data science deals with quantitative and qualitative data (e.g., from images, text, sensors, transactions, customer information, etc.) and emphasizes prediction and action. Andrew Gelman of Columbia University has described statistics as a non-essential part of data science. Stanford professor David Donoho writes that data science is not distinguished from statistics by the size of datasets or use of computing and that many graduate programs misleadingly advertise their analytics and statistics training as the essence of a data-science program. He describes data science as an applied field growing out of traditional statistics.
The term "data science" has been traced back to 1974, when Peter Naur proposed it as an alternative name to computer science. In 1996, the International Federation of Classification Societies became the first conference to specifically feature data science as a topic. However, the definition was still in flux. After the 1985 lecture at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, in 1997 C. F. Jeff Wu again suggested that statistics should be renamed data science. He reasoned that a new name would help statistics shed inaccurate stereotypes, such as being synonymous with accounting or limited to describing data. In 1998, Hayashi Chikio argued for data science as a new, interdisciplinary concept, with three aspects: data design, collection, and analysis.
The modern conception of data science as an independent discipline is sometimes attributed to William S. Cleveland. In 2014, the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining changed its name to the Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science, reflecting the ascendant popularity of data science.. In 2013 the first European Conference on Data Analysis (ECDA2013) started in Luxembourg the process which founded the European Association for Data Science (EuADS) www.euads.org in Luxembourg in 2015.
The professional title of "data scientist" has been attributed to DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher in 2008. Though it was used by the National Science Board in their 2005 report "Long-Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century", it referred broadly to any key role in managing a digital data collection.
Data science involves working with larger datasets that often require advanced computational and statistical methods to analyze. Data scientists often work with unstructured data such as text or images and use machine learning algorithms to build predictive models. Data science often uses statistical analysis, data preprocessing, and supervised learning.
Some distributed computing frameworks are designed to handle big data workloads. These frameworks can enable data scientists to process and analyze large datasets in parallel, which can reduce processing times.
Machine learning models can amplify existing biases present in training data, leading to discriminatory or unfair outcomes.
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