DEV Community

dharanish s
dharanish s

Posted on

Data Science: A Complete Introduction

What is Data Science?
Businesses can examine massive amounts of organized and unstructured big data to look for trends thanks to data science. In turn, this enables businesses to strengthen their competitive advantage, control expenses, find new market opportunities, and increase efficiencies.

Data science is required when requesting recommendations from a personal assistant like Siri or Alexa. The same goes for utilizing a search engine that returns relevant results, driving a self-driving car, or chatting with a chatbot for customer support. These are all practical uses of data science.
Data Science Definition
Data science is the activity of analyzing vast amounts of unstructured and organized raw data to find patterns and draw conclusions that can be put to use. Data science is an interdisciplinary field, and the foundations include statistics, inference, computer science, predictive analytics, the creation of machine learning algorithms, and new tools for extracting information from large data sets.

Start with the life cycle of data science to describe it and enhance data science project management. The first step in the process for data science is capture, which entails gathering data, occasionally extracting it, and entering it into the system. Data warehousing, data cleaning, data processing, data staging, and data architecture are all parts of the maintenance stage.

Data Science Preparation and Exploration

The most crucial data science skills are data preparation and analysis, although these tasks often take up 60 to 70 percent of a data scientist's work. Data that It has been organized and free of noise, which is rare. The data is altered and prepared for use in the following step.

This step of the process involves data transformation and sampling, feature and observation verification, and noise removal using statistical approaches. This process also reveals whether the different aspects of the data set are independent of one another and if the data may contain missing values. ‍
Data Science Modeling
Data scientists use machine learning methods to fit the data into the model during the modeling phase. The type of data and the business requirements influence the model choice.

The model is then put to the test to see how accurate it is and other aspects. This gives the data scientist the ability to modify the model to get the desired outcome. The team can choose from a variety of different data science models if the model isn't exactly perfect for the objectives.

The model can be finalized and deployed if appropriate testing with high-quality data yields the expected outcomes for the business intelligence requirement.
What Can Data Science Be Used For?
Applications of data science are often employed in the fields of policy, banking, marketing, and healthcare. Here are a few typical instances of data science services being used in hot data science fields:
How Data Science is Transforming Health Care
Healthcare is being transformed by data science as consumers and healthcare professionals use wearable data to track and avoid health issues and emergencies. Healthcare is undergoing a "big data revolution," according to McKinsey in 2018. In reality, applying data science to the US healthcare system could cut spending by $300 billion to $450 billion, or 12 to 17 percent, of the overall cost of healthcare, according to McKinsey.
Data Science vs Data Analytics
Although the work of data scientists and data analysts is occasionally mixed up, these professions are distinct from one another. In reality, the term "data science analyst" only denotes one of these two roles.

The data analyst will probably be employing a single query or group of questions to analyze a particular dataset of structured or numerical data. It is more likely that a data scientist will work with higher volumes of both organized and unstructured data. Additionally, they will develop, experiment with, and evaluate data questions' effectiveness within the framework of a larger plan.

Data analytics is less about predictive modeling and machine learning and more about putting historical data into perspective. Data analysis depends on having the appropriate questions in place from the beginning; it is not an open-minded search for the best query. Data analysts often do not develop statistical models or train machine learning tools, in contrast to data scientists.
‍Big Data vs Data Science

Data is gathered from a variety of sources, including text files, instruments, financial logs, multimedia forms, and online purchases. Unstructured, semi-structured, or structured data are all possible.

Data from blogs, digital audio/video streams, digital photos, emails, mobile devices, sensors, social networks, tweets, web pages, and online sources are all examples of unstructured data. Data from text files, XML files, and system log files are all examples of semi-structured data. OLTP, RDBMS (databases), transaction data and other formats are examples of structured data that has already undergone some processing.

There is no one method, tool, or approach to data science. Instead, it is a scientific method that processes huge amounts of data using applied statistical and mathematical theory as well as computer tools.
Data Science vs Statistics
Data science is a vast, interdisciplinary field that combines statistics, computer science, applied business management, economics, mathematics, programming, and software engineering. Data scientists use techniques from other professions, including statistics, to accomplish these goals. Data science difficulties necessitate the gathering, processing, management, analysis, and visualization of massive amounts of data.

Data science and big data are closely related, and most big data is in unstructured formats and contains some non-numeric data. As a result, a data scientist's job involves removing noise and gleaning valuable insights from the data they are processing.

These statistical activities necessitate careful planning and execution in the four data-related domains of acquisition, architecture, analysis, and archiving. Data science's "4As" are particular to the discipline.
Data Mining vs Data Science
Data science is a real subject of scientific study or discipline, whereas data mining is a practice utilized in both business and data science. Making data more useful for a particular commercial purpose is the aim of data mining. Creating data-driven products and outcomes is the goal of data science, typically in a corporate environment.

Since analyzing vast volumes of raw, unprocessed data is within the purview of data science, data mining mostly deals with structured data. Data mining is one of the things a data scientist might do, though, and it's a skill that belongs to science.
Data Science vs Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is basically a term for computer simulations of human brain activity. Learning, rational thinking, and self-correction are characteristics that indicate this form of brain function. In other words, a computer is an AI when it has the ability to reason, draw inferences, and correct itself as it learns.

Artificial intelligence can be broad or specific. The term "general AI" describes the categories of intelligent machines that we frequently encounter in movies. They are almost as capable of handling a wide range of tasks that require cognition, judgment, and reasoning as humans are. This has not yet been accomplished.

Artificial neural networks are being developed by scientists and engineers in an effort to attain artificial intelligence. However, even for extremely specific purposes, teaching machines to think like a human brain requires an amazing quantity of data. This is the point where the fields of data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning converge.

Top comments (0)