Distinguishing Data Science from...

Business Intelligence
Statistics
Data(base) Management
Visualization
Machine Learning
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Huge number of
relevant courses,
new and existing.
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I worry that the Data Scientist role is like
the mythical webmaster of the 90s:
master of all trades.
-- Aaron Kimball, CTO Wibidata
What data science tells me:
If youre a DBA, you need to learn to deal with
unstructured data
If youre a statistician, you need to learn to
deal with data that does not fit in memory
If youre a software engineer, you need to
learn statistical modeling and how to
communicate results.
If youre a business analyst, you need to learn
about algorithms and tradeoffs at scale
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tools abstractions
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Breadth
Hadoop

PostgreSQL

glm() in R

Tableau

MapReduce

Relational Algebra

Logistic Regression

InfoVis
structures statistics
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Depth
Management

Relational Algebra

Standards

Analysis

Linear Algebra

ad hoc files
desktop cloud
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Scale
main memory

R

local files
distributed

Hadoop

S3, Azure Storage
hackers analysts
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Target
Assume
proficiency in
Python, Java, R
Assume little or no
programming
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tools
abstr.
desk
cloud
structs stats
hackers analysts