DATA SCIENCE - WHY THE HYPE?

“The world is one big data problem!”

If I ask you - what is Data Science? – what would you say?

People have always found it slightly difficult to define data science in a single sentence, maybe because of its vast multitude or because they are too overwhelmed by it. Put it simply, DATA SCIENCE IS THE STUDY OF DATA! There you go, you have achieved the first step in visualising what data science is. It involves developing methods of recording, storing, and analysing data to effectively extract meaningful information.

The goal is to procure information from any sort of data, whether structured, or unstructured. That’s what a data scientist does. You can now grasp the importance of data science, it is literally the oil for IT industry. Ask any prominent data scientist, and he or she would say that an analytics aspirant needs to stay constantly focused and updated about the industry. Be it the languages involved, the industry’s functioning, the tools used, the advancements in its allied fields like IoT, Machine Learning and more, there’s really a lot happening around analytics.

One of the toughest mysteries out there, is cracking customer behaviour. The reason why data science fetched such popularity around the world is because of its ability to uncover customer behaviour and more so, improve their  experience. It acts as a tool that helps reduce costs, tap new markets and make better decisions. If you want to embark on a journey involving Data Science, better read up about what experts have to say. You cannot be living under a rock!

Many people aspire to become full blown data scientists but unfortunately few successfully climb that hill, and that is because it requires a combination of both hard skills (like Python scripting, SQL or Spark) and soft skills (like business or communication skills). It involves training in the most in-demand technologies such as data science on R, SAS, Big Data on Hadoop and implement concepts of exploring data, regression models, hypothesis testing, and Spark. But there’s definitely no reason why you cannot master these skills to smash the target. If you talk about it as a job, then it’s a big YES! According to Glassdoor, “Data Scientist” has been named as the number one job in the US, with its appeal growing rapidly in India.