Database Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Data Science:
Making Something
Out of Nothing
“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
- Albert Einstein
“The power of Data Science is becoming a mission-critical part of every business.”
-
InsideSales.com
CEO David Elkington
Clay is nothing but a combination of dirt and moisture until the potter throws it on a
wheel and “organizes” this chaotic disparity into a useful, cohesive object which is either
serviceable or beautiful or both. A blank canvas and a collection of oil paints have little
value when taken on their own, but when combined via the
hands, vision, skills,
and
tech-
nique
of a talented artist, they can add up to a priceless masterpiece. Just ask Picasso.
The same is true with data. Groups of chaotic, unstructured data taken on their own
can be worse than useless. They can be a pointless drain of memory, cash, and manpower.
However, when leveraged, organized, categorized, and creatively combined by skilled, intu-
itive Data Scientists, this same data can and usually does add up to invaluable, highly prof-
itable business intelligence (BI).
William Rand, assistant professor of marketing decisions, operations and information
technology at the University of Maryland (also director of that school's Center for Complex-
ity in Business), states the point most clearly: “Data needs to be organized into information
and then transformed into knowledge to become useful for managerial application.”
The job of the Data Scientist then, is to extract finely-tuned insight from raw data: to
gather and creatively combine resources, leverage these with data-parsing tools, impose as-
sumptions on what kind of parsing should be applied to what classes of data, and intuit what
questions might be most profitably imposed upon the data.
