Becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think

Re:Becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think by ahi on Monday October 15, 2012 @08:43AM (#4654791)

If you are an actuary you are already a data scientist.

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Re:Becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think by EzGraphs on Monday October 15, 2012 @09:34AM (#4654950)

Yeah - particularly the mathematical/statistical side of things. But a big part of the profession is software development / computer science. An actuary might construct useful models and choose the proper techniques to analyze data, but choose inferior technologies or suboptimal implementations that won't work for large data sets.

A lot of actuaries spend most of their life inside of Excel. Excel won't cut it with Big Data.

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Re:Becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think by hessenwolf on Monday October 15, 2012 @09:50AM (#4655011)

A big part of the profession, and zero part of the training in the profession. Actuaries write worse code than electrical engineers.

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Re:Becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think by nesu on Monday October 15, 2012 @12:04PM (#4655658)

Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.

source: http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/10/04/engineering-practices-in-d...

Software development is important, but it's not everything. People choose what works and use it.

Though I agree that spreadsheets won't always work on Big Data, there's no point in doing more if you can achieve it with less.

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