If data science is a field which interests you and if you are piqued about building a career in it then, our advice for you is that you start preparing for your journey now. In order to understand the core concepts of data science, you might need some time. This will not only be useful, but it will also help you introspect and decide whether you are truly suited for the field of data science.
What is Data Science?
Today, data is everywhere. At the current date around 2.7 zettabytes of data exists and the projected growth for the same is around 180 zettabytes in the year 2025.
However, all this data has only recently begun to be analyzed. Hence, more and more organizations are seeking professionals to make sense of all this data to help them make efficient decisions.
Data Science is about dealing with unstructured and structured data so as to clean the already existing data and prepare it for proficient analysis
Learn how to use Data Science?
As mentioned data science is all about uncovering various findings from the data available at your disposal. It involves drilling down to the deepest level to extract uncovered data, if any, and understand the behavioural complexity of the same. But it also involves learning about the trends, correlation between the data and the inferences it draws to enable businesses to make smarter decisions.
The steps followed by a data scientist involve data exploration to investigate leads by extracting patterns pertaining to a challenging problem. Furthermore, they apply various statistical and quantitative techniques to uncover trends and correlation among the data. Using the statistical guidance, they derive insights from the analysis and patterns. These insights are then used by the organization to make intelligent and business effective decisions.
Skills you need to be a Data Scientist
As discussed to be a data scientist you must possess paramount knowledge about various statistical and predictive models. Moreover, you need to deploy algorithms which will fish out the hidden trends in the existing data.
- Probability
Probability corresponds to the likelihood of the occurrence of an event. Most of data science is based on determining the probability of various events. You must have a firm grasp on the principles of probability if you are planning to go the data scientist way.
- Statistics
Statistics deals with analyzing and interpreting the data of an organization. Having an idea about the various statistical techniques will only boost your chance of discovering various trends among the data.
- Linear Algebra
Linear Algebra corresponds to the study of vector spacing and linear mapping. In order to understand various predictive mining algorithms, you need to be aware of the principles of linear algebra.
- Programming
Apart from mathematics, you need to be proficient with programming languages such as Python and R as they allow you to fire up your algorithms on the data. The programming part serves as the execution, handle of a data scientist, and hence, it is preferred to have knowledge about the same.
Thus, in order to follow the path of a data scientist you must be aware of mathematics and programming as it will make things easier for you.
