Data science

Data science, also known as data-driven science, is an interdisciplinary field about scientific methods, processes and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD).

Data science is a "concept to unify statistics, data analysis and their related methods" in order to "understand and analyze actual phenomena" with data. It employs techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the broad areas of mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science, in particular from the subdomains of machine learning, classification, cluster analysis, data mining, databases, and visualization.

Turing award winner Jim Gray imagined data science as a "fourth paradigm" of science (empirical, theoretical, computational and now data-driven) and asserted that "everything about science is changing because of the impact of information technology" and the data deluge.

When Harvard Business Review called it "The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century" the term became a buzzword, and is now often applied to business analytics, or even arbitrary use of data, or used as a sexed-up term for statistics. While many university programs now offer a data science degree, there exists no consensus on a definition or curriculum contents. Because of the current popularity of this term, there are many "advocacy efforts" surrounding it.

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