Who is a Data Scientist? :
A Data Scientist is someone who uses data to increase profit or influence a metric of interest.
There are 4 types of task that a data scientist can perform:
- Business Intelligence : Expressing data in effective visualizations to enable effective decision-making.
- Data Analysis : Using data to explain why something happened in the past.
- Data Analytics : Using data to predict what will happen in the future.
- Data Engineering : Collecting, transforming, moving and storing data to make the above three possible.
Canonically this is what a commercial data scientist is involved with. But there is another dimension to how a data scientist’s role could be explained.
There is nothing called a “Data Scientist”. Its a marketing term. There is only science and science is always based on data. Data and science are two sides of the same coin. Opinions are not based on data, but science always is.
So, a Data Scientist is someone who poses a hypothesis and then collects data and performs experiments to empirically accept and reject the hypothesis. The role of the scientist is to uncover the truth as it is and report it without judgment or opinion. A scientist is, therefore, a seeker of truth.
