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Can't say I could answer all these questions, but I think they're really great and motivate me to spend more time studying statistics. With the rise in data sci

Can't say I could answer all these questions, but I think they're really great and motivate me to spend more time studying statistics. With the rise in data science and machine learning I've noticed a lot of resources devoted to teaching people how to create and train models for a given problem, but less resources on how to interpret those models and on statistical inference in general.

RA_Fisher 9y ago
It's quite rare to find folks in the industry with formal education in statistics. The folks that have it can run circles around everyone else, though. Data Science and Analytics and Machine Learning all use statistical theory when boiled down.
- icelancer 9y ago
  When I ran a Data Science team we primarily hired Physicists and Mathematics majors and not CS graduates for this reason. It mostly worked as intended (untapped source of excellent candidates), but some of them could not for the life of them pick up software development / writing manageable code with a team. They were so used to writing unmanageable scripts that didn't have long-term time horizons (think: horrors of hundreds and thousands of lines of R-stats code in a single file, uncommented, and brutal to look at, with the expectation we'll just plug it into R-script on the command line) that occasionally this became a very tough habit to break. Still, besides that issue - which all novice programmers have, but Data Scientists come in at a much more senior level - it was a great market advantage, one that I think is largely gone today, as companies understand the need for statisticians and economists who really and truly understand modeling and math.
  - RA_Fisher 9y ago
    Yeah, my experience is almost a perfect match. These days I'm wondering how a statistician can best capitalize long-term in tech?
    - derping69 9y ago
      learn AI, start a company with a bunch of buddies with the sole intent of being acquired for your talents. There was a company that did this a while back, I don't even think they actually had a product, they just knew that one of the big four would pay millions to acquihire them.
  - botnik 9y ago
    Physicists and Mathematics majors can only be better than a CS grad, if they come prepped with Softwrae Development experience. A CS grad can communicate better with the code they write and most of the time assuming it's straight CS have knowledge and experience of ML that exceeds a Physics/Math major. Anecdotally, I've worked in places where this is a major source of contention - The Data Scientists treated as talented individuals (who produce broken solutions which work for cherry picked data sets), and anyone else is just a monkey who maintains and fixes the broken code.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      >Physicists and Mathematics majors can only be better than a CS grad, if they come prepped with Softwrae Development experience This is very much the opposite of my experience.
- alexcnwy 9y ago
  I find it curious that machine learning is a branch of computer science given how much of it is actually statistical learning theory. The go-to graduate level machine learning text "The Elements of Statistical Learning" was written by 2 statistics professors (one, Prof. Hastie, a fellow South African! :) Granted, neural networks are often taught as a bolt-on lecture in statistics course machine learning modules but topics like regularization and a rigorous study of overfitting were born in stats departments.
- user5994461 9y ago
  I'd say the opposite. It's quite rare to see employees without a formal education in statistics. That being said, there are few of them and they congregate to the big tech and finance names. It can look like everyone or noone has a formal education, depending on where you personally work.

RA_Fisher 9y ago

It's quite rare to find folks in the industry with formal education in statistics. The folks that have it can run circles around everyone else, though. Data Science and Analytics and Machine Learning all use statistical theory when boiled down.

icelancer 9y ago
When I ran a Data Science team we primarily hired Physicists and Mathematics majors and not CS graduates for this reason. It mostly worked as intended (untapped source of excellent candidates), but some of them could not for the life of them pick up software development / writing manageable code with a team. They were so used to writing unmanageable scripts that didn't have long-term time horizons (think: horrors of hundreds and thousands of lines of R-stats code in a single file, uncommented, and brutal to look at, with the expectation we'll just plug it into R-script on the command line) that occasionally this became a very tough habit to break. Still, besides that issue - which all novice programmers have, but Data Scientists come in at a much more senior level - it was a great market advantage, one that I think is largely gone today, as companies understand the need for statisticians and economists who really and truly understand modeling and math.
- RA_Fisher 9y ago
  Yeah, my experience is almost a perfect match. These days I'm wondering how a statistician can best capitalize long-term in tech?
  - derping69 9y ago
    learn AI, start a company with a bunch of buddies with the sole intent of being acquired for your talents. There was a company that did this a while back, I don't even think they actually had a product, they just knew that one of the big four would pay millions to acquihire them.
- botnik 9y ago
  Physicists and Mathematics majors can only be better than a CS grad, if they come prepped with Softwrae Development experience. A CS grad can communicate better with the code they write and most of the time assuming it's straight CS have knowledge and experience of ML that exceeds a Physics/Math major. Anecdotally, I've worked in places where this is a major source of contention - The Data Scientists treated as talented individuals (who produce broken solutions which work for cherry picked data sets), and anyone else is just a monkey who maintains and fixes the broken code.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >Physicists and Mathematics majors can only be better than a CS grad, if they come prepped with Softwrae Development experience This is very much the opposite of my experience.
alexcnwy 9y ago
I find it curious that machine learning is a branch of computer science given how much of it is actually statistical learning theory. The go-to graduate level machine learning text "The Elements of Statistical Learning" was written by 2 statistics professors (one, Prof. Hastie, a fellow South African! :) Granted, neural networks are often taught as a bolt-on lecture in statistics course machine learning modules but topics like regularization and a rigorous study of overfitting were born in stats departments.
user5994461 9y ago
I'd say the opposite. It's quite rare to see employees without a formal education in statistics. That being said, there are few of them and they congregate to the big tech and finance names. It can look like everyone or noone has a formal education, depending on where you personally work.