Re:How to Become a Data Scientist, Part 2
by moseandre on Sunday August 07, 2016 @07:14PM
(#12244287)
It was a statistics class where I learned a linear time median algorithm. But that was pretty lucky, I admit.
95% of undergraduate statistics education is focused on formal inference. Data science, in my experience, involves a lot more exploratory data analysis [1] than formal inference (frequentist or Bayesian).
The extreme focus on inference and the hypothesis testing step in the scientific method is something people with a formal statistics education have to overcome to be productive data scientists. Or applied statisticians, really! It is more important to understand the data, organize it creatively, and find unexpected structure.
95% of undergraduate statistics education is focused on formal inference. Data science, in my experience, involves a lot more exploratory data analysis [1] than formal inference (frequentist or Bayesian).
The extreme focus on inference and the hypothesis testing step in the scientific method is something people with a formal statistics education have to overcome to be productive data scientists. Or applied statisticians, really! It is more important to understand the data, organize it creatively, and find unexpected structure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis