What is Data Science?

You probably hear the word "Data Science" on a regular basis. But what exactly is data science? And why are we hearing so much about it now?

First let us understand why data science is needed.

The need for Data Science

In this era of smartphones and internet, we have seen an exponential increase in data. More and more data is produced everyday as the number of people using internet is increasing. This led to the problem of storing the enormous amount of data. Frameworks like Hadoop and others solved the problem of storing the data. But what about processing this data? The previous techniques can no longer be used efficiently as they were built of processing on smaller data. This is where Data Science comes into the picture. 

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What is Data Science?

The formal definition of Data Science goes as follows: "Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from data in various forms, both structured and unstructured." - Wikipedia

Putting it into simple words, Data Science is the field of collecting data and extracting meaningful information from it. It uses the concepts of Mathematics, Computer Science and Domain (or Business) knowledge to extract useful insights from data.

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Where is Data Science used?

• Ever wonder how Amazon is able to recommend the products that you want? This is because companies like Amazon use the data of their customers like age, gender, browsing history, purchase history and income to determine the products that the customer is likely to buy.
• Data Science is also used for predictive analysis using concepts like Machine Learning. Perhaps the best example is weather forecasting. The data from satellites, ships, aircrafts, radars are collected and analyzed to build various models. These models learn from previous data and predict the weather or even natural calamities.
• Self driving cars is an excellent example of the application of Data Science. The car collects data from various sensors and decides what to do next.
• Data Science is also used to make various business decisions. The insights available from current data is taken into account to determine if the decision will be good for the company before making any big business decision.