Читать книгу Data Science For Dummies - Lillian Pierson - Страница 11

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deploying data science methods across various industries

Piecing together the core data science components

Identifying viable data science solutions to business challenges

Exploring data science career alternatives

For over a decade now, everyone has been absolutely deluged by data. It’s coming from every computer, every mobile device, every camera, and every imaginable sensor — and now it’s even coming from watches and other wearable technologies. Data is generated in every social media interaction we humans make, every file we save, every picture we take, and every query we submit; data is even generated when we do something as simple as ask a favorite search engine for directions to the closest ice cream shop.

Although data immersion is nothing new, you may have noticed that the phenomenon is accelerating. Lakes, puddles, and rivers of data have turned to floods and veritable tsunamis of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data that’s streaming from almost every activity that takes place in both the digital and physical worlds. It’s just an unavoidable fact of life within the information age.

If you’re anything like I was, you may have wondered, “What’s the point of all this data? Why use valuable resources to generate and collect it?” Although even just two decades ago, no one was in a position to make much use of most of the data that’s generated, the tides today have definitely turned. Specialists known as data engineers are constantly finding innovative and powerful new ways to capture, collate, and condense unimaginably massive volumes of data, and other specialists, known as data scientists, are leading change by deriving valuable and actionable insights from that data.

In its truest form, data science represents the optimization of processes and resources. Data science produces data insights — actionable, data-informed conclusions or predictions that you can use to understand and improve your business, your investments, your health, and even your lifestyle and social life. Using data science insights is like being able to see in the dark. For any goal or pursuit you can imagine, you can find data science methods to help you predict the most direct route from where you are to where you want to be — and to anticipate every pothole in the road between both places.