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Yes and no - the component pieces of data science have been used for years, but as the OP describes, the field of data science assembles skills and tools that r

Yes and no - the component pieces of data science have been used for years, but as the OP describes, the field of data science assembles skills and tools that really haven't been universally understood and effectively applied to problem solving - it is a relatively fundamental shift to a new way of interacting with data.

hyperbovine 14y ago
Please. Statisticians have been doing this for over 300 years. Cooking up some infographic on your Hadoop cluster is not the paradigm shift you are making it out to be.
- CognitiveLens 14y ago
  It sounds like we're not talking about the same thing.
  - hyperbovine 14y ago
    No, we are. You are talking about gathering, modeling and summarizing data. To claim that those skills "really haven't been universally understood and effectively applied to problem solving" is ludicrous. What do you think scientists did prior to the advent of "data science"?
    - CognitiveLens 14y ago
      Every field of science is about gathering, modeling and summarizing data - that is not exclusive to statistics or any other field, which means we need to be more specific than that to determine whether Data Science is doing anything different than statistics. Unfortunately data science is not well defined (in part because it is a young field), but it draws extensively from computer science and is targeted toward data sets that are different from those that have typically been used in 'traditional' statistics - huge, dirty data sets. This debate has a similar flavor to Physicists saying that Chemistry is not a science because it's all just physics, and Chemists saying that Biology is not a science because it's all just chemistry. They are extensions, just like Data science, and pretending that an expert statistician will be and expert data scientist is just not tenable. There is room for something more.

hyperbovine 14y ago

Please. Statisticians have been doing this for over 300 years. Cooking up some infographic on your Hadoop cluster is not the paradigm shift you are making it out to be.

CognitiveLens 14y ago
It sounds like we're not talking about the same thing.
- hyperbovine 14y ago
  No, we are. You are talking about gathering, modeling and summarizing data. To claim that those skills "really haven't been universally understood and effectively applied to problem solving" is ludicrous. What do you think scientists did prior to the advent of "data science"?
  - CognitiveLens 14y ago
    Every field of science is about gathering, modeling and summarizing data - that is not exclusive to statistics or any other field, which means we need to be more specific than that to determine whether Data Science is doing anything different than statistics. Unfortunately data science is not well defined (in part because it is a young field), but it draws extensively from computer science and is targeted toward data sets that are different from those that have typically been used in 'traditional' statistics - huge, dirty data sets. This debate has a similar flavor to Physicists saying that Chemistry is not a science because it's all just physics, and Chemists saying that Biology is not a science because it's all just chemistry. They are extensions, just like Data science, and pretending that an expert statistician will be and expert data scientist is just not tenable. There is room for something more.