What is Data science

“The future belongs to those businesses that create it,” is an old saying whereas “The future belongs to those companies that can turn data into a product,” is a new epigram. 

Data science is a process of extracting useful information from massive amounts of data, gather data sets and derive insights from them through a multidisciplinary blend of technology or algorithms.  This makes it easy for the companies to interpret data for the purpose of decision making and understand their customer’s behavior.  

It is also known as data-driven science, involved with scientific methods, processes, systems and tools to extract knowledge or actionable data insights from various forms of data either structured or unstructured. It encompasses the techniques and theories drawn from various fields such as mathematics, statistics, information science, computer science and in particular from the sub-domains of machine learning, cluster analysis, big data,  data mining and data visualization. 

According to Harvard Business Review, the term data science is entitled as a hyped-up term for Statistics or it can also be presented as “Statistics=Data Science”. 

Rise of Data Science and Challenges

Data is increasing rapidly and it can be found everywhere. Creating insights from the myriads of new data types generated from weblogs, mobile devices, sensors, and other computational devices has become a hectic task. 

With the emergence of new technologies, the process of organizing oceans of data, identifying patterns and regularities that create value for businesses has become an easy-peasy job in the present days.

According to a report by IBM, 90 percent of present data in the world has been generated two years back. Today, almost every sector is flooded-up with more data than ever imagined and still accumulating data at a rate that exceeds their capacity to extract valuable insights. So, the challenge is how to use data effectively? —not only own data but also that is available and relevant. 

Analyzing data has become more and more important for businesses to create opportunities and growth. In a quest to turn the data into a valuable asset, companies are still discovering new ways to identify the potential of utilizing data and generating value that is profitable. Data Science has been transforming almost all areas from healthcare to media, offering a new approach to make discoveries. By incorporating aspects of statistics, mathematics, and visualization, data science can turn vast amounts of data into new insights and knowledge.

Healthcare Industry led by Data Science

Healthcare is already been taken over by data science, in improving the outcomes of epidemics and predicting patient’s behavior. The rise of EHR systems gave new dimensions in maintaining the data related to patients. Let’s take a real-time incident when there was a Swine Flu outbreak in 2009, Google was able to analyze and track the progress of the outbreak by following the searches related to Swine Flu topics. Not only Google, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn and other internet giants make use of data science technologies to save the customer searches to create appropriate recommendations and correlate with customer’s behavior.