My take on data science, and what makes it distinct from other fields, is that it combines a knowledge of the business logic (i.e. software engineering) with k

My take on data science, and what makes it distinct from other fields, is that it combines a knowledge of the business logic (i.e. software engineering) with knowledge of statistics. For example, a statistician might wonder exactly what a particular ID referred to. Does it mean a person, an IP address, a single "session". They could, of course, find this out, but the data scientist would already know this. Similarly, a software engineer might wonder what information they need to be collecting from the user. The data scientist knows what analysis will ultimately be done, and so knows what information must be collected. So data science combines statistics and software engineering, and this is useful because it allows a holistic view of the data analysis process, from the collection of data, to the statistical analysis of the processed data.