What is Data Science?

The lifecycle begins with the data collection--both raw structured and unstructured data from all relevant sources using a variety of methods. These methods can include manual entry, web scraping, and real-time streaming data from systems and devices. Data sources can include structured data, such as customer data, along with unstructured data like log files, video, audio, pictures, the Internet of Things (IoT), social media, and more.

Since data can have different formats and structures, companies need to consider other storage systems based on the type of data that needs to be captured. Data management teams help to set standards around data storage and structure, which facilitate workflows around analytics, machine learning, and deep learning models. This stage includes cleaning data, deduplicating, transforming, and combining the data using ETL (extract, transform, load) jobs or other data integration technologies. This data preparation is essential for promoting data quality before loading into a data warehouse, data lake, or another repository.

Here, we, data scientists conduct an exploratory data analysis to examine biases, patterns, ranges, and distributions of values within the data. This data analytics exploration drives hypothesis generation for a/b testing. It also allows analysts to determine the data’s relevance for use within modeling efforts for predictive analytics, machine learning, and/or deep learning. Depending on a model’s accuracy, organizations can become reliant on these insights for business decision-making, allowing them to drive more scalability.

Finally, insights are presented as reports and other data visualizations that make the insights—and their impact on business—easier for business analysts and other decision-makers to understand. A data science programming languages such as R or Python includes components for generating.