What is Data Science?

Definition of Data Science

Data science has many definitions but according to UC Berkeley data science is “the domain of study that deals with vast volumes of data using modern tools and techniques to find unseen patterns, derive meaningful information, and make business decisions”. However, my definition of data science Is a bit different it is producing the results of a wizard with the tools of today. I feel this way because data science in essence is trying to predict the future of a business(wizard) with data (tools of today). However, not all of what people would consider data scientists are actually data scientists, there are a couple of different types of people that deal with data and while they all do close to the same job there are a few distinct differences that may cause one person to prefer one compared to another.

Types of Data Scientists:

There are three jobs that people usually put into the category of a “Data Scientist”: Data scientist, data engineer, and data analyst. Refer to the table below to understand their differences. Also, if you would like to know more in-depth about the nuanced differences between the three jobs here is a video that helped me to understand them.

	Data Analyst	Data Engineer	Data Scientist
What the job does	Takes current business problem and uses current data to try to find a fix that will work today	Builds and maintains the backend of the system to collect, store, and maintain the data.	Deals with a business problem but tries to find more long-term solutions or tries to find conditions in the future (what will the sales of X product be next year?)
Skills needed	[2]– Data cleaning and preparation – Data analysis and exploration – Creating data visualizations – Writing and communication – Problem-solving	[3]– SQL – Coding – Machine learning – Data Architecture – Data warehousing – Apache Hardoop-Based Analytics	[4]– Programming language – Database skills – Mathematics (especially statistics) – Data analysis and visualization – Machine learning – Big data
Average Salary per year	Average: $72,397 per year Senior: $100,891 per year	Average: $110,545 per year Senior:$152,569 per year	Average: $121,282 per year Senior: $148,420 per year

Conclusion:

All in all, data science is a field that is like trying to predict the future, and not all of what we consider data science is actually data science there are different fields within most peoples’ perception of data science. Thank you for reading my first blog post and have a nice day!

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