Statisticians are usually preoccupied with understanding the properties of a data set. There is a penumbra of activities which are associated with statistics th

Statisticians are usually preoccupied with understanding the properties of a data set. There is a penumbra of activities which are associated with statistics that have become relatively more important as technology has changed - getting the data, managing the data and transmitting the understanding of the data to humans. Most of the people who successfully market themselves as pucker data scientists do have Ph.D's - often in Machine Learning, but sometimes in Maths or HCI.