What is Data Science and Big Data?
I would like to start this blog by answering the question “What is Data Science?” But I think it will be better to start by talking about how you, the reader, are experiencing and interacting with this field on a daily basis.
Unless if you live in a shack on an isolated island somewhere, you are likely to be interacting with products big companies build using Big Data and Data Science. Take Google for example, we will talk about one reason that made Google great in a separate blog, every time you use google to look up something you are interacting with one, or many, of their data science products. Google uses something we call Natural Language processing and Recommendation Engine algorithms to return the most useful search results when you look something up. Another example is Facebook, let’s take one example from Facebook, the “Friends You Might Know” feature, this is all based on data science algorithms that learn about you and your connections, and based on your network, in part that is, the algorithm makes the decision that you are likely to be friends with X, Y, and Z. If you are an iPhone user and love using Siri, or if you use Amazon’s Alexa, then you are interacting with a Data Science product. The examples go on and on, just to list a few, Netflix knowing what movies you might like, EA Sports online gaming: matching you with the appropriate opponent, Uber: optimizing your route, Pandora: selecting a song you might like, and many other examples.
Now that you have an idea about the things Data Science and Big Data can do, let’s answer the question of what is Data Science. Data Science is an interdisciplinary field of math & statistics, computer science, and domain expertise. It is a filed that help convert Data into Knowledge. You see, companies, governments, and all sorts of institutions are collecting massive amounts of data and this data contains insights but these insights are not easily seen without the proper tool to mine these bodies of data. A Data Scientist is someone who is able to extract these insights using math, statistics, computer science, and domain knowledge. Figure below shows a Venn diagram of what Data Science is.
Venn diagram of what Data Science is
Data science has been applied to almost every industry from Finance, real estate, military, mining industry, insurance, manufacturing, forest reservation, online shopping, education, etc.
At the heart of it, Data Science is all about finding patterns in data and using these patterns to make predictions. Take for example Amazon, Data Scientists at Amazon employ a family of algorithms called Recommendation Engines, a set very powerful algorithms that are able to predict the things a user will like, or hate, songs you might like to listen to, books that you are likely to read, etc. (You can learn more about Recommendation Engines, and how it is altering our decision making process, by reading my presentation on this exciting topic here)
Applications of Data Science can be very profitable for companies. The application of Recommendation Engines alone contribute to about 35% of Amazon’s sales, that is billions of dollars of returns from applying these algorithms. It is estimated that 65% of movies watched on Netflix are those recommended to the users. It is also estimated that recommendation engines generate ~38% more clicks on Google News.
Data Science @ Analytica
At Analytica our team of data scientists have worked with clients from different industries to build Advanced Data Science solutions and products. Our clients include Jones Lang Lasalle, Volkswagen, Cisco, Procter & Gamble, US Army, Canadian Government, US Federal Government, clients in the energy sector, and others.
Just as a teaser, the figure below shows an example of how one of the algorithms we developed at Analytica “thinks.” For more details see our presentation.
an example of how one of the algorithms we developed at Analytica “thinks.” For more details see our presentation.
If you would like to learn more about our work, or if you would like to get our free demo please don’t hesitate to contact us.
[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]