What is Data Science?

Data science combines math and statistics, specialized programming, advanced analytics,
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with specific subject matter expertise to
uncover actionable insights hidden in an organization’s data. These insights can be used to
guide decision making and strategic planning.
This logic behind the data or the process behind the manipulation is what is known as Data
Science.
Data science is the study of data to extract meaningful insights for business. It is a
multidisciplinary approach that combines principles and practices from the fields of
mathematics, statistics, artificial intelligence, and computer engineering to analyze large
amounts of data. This analysis helps data scientists to ask and answer questions like what
happened, why it happened, what will happen, and what can be done with the results.
Data Science Process Life Cycle
There are some steps that are necessary for any of the tasks that are being done in the field of
data science to derive any fruitful results from the data at hand.
Data Collection – After formulating any problem statement the main task is to calculate data
that can help us in our analysis and manipulation. Sometimes data is collected by performing
some kind of survey and there are times when it is done by performing scrapping.
Data Cleaning – Most of the real-world data is not structured and requires cleaning and
conversion into structured data before it can be used for any analysis or modeling.
Exploratory Data Analysis – This is the step in which we try to find the hidden patterns in
the data at hand. Also, we try to analyze different factors which affect the target variable and
the extent to which it does so. How the independent features are related to each other and
what can be done to achieve the desired results all these answers can be extracted from this
process as well. This also gives us a direction in which we should work to get started with the
modeling process.
Model Building – Different types of machine learning algorithms as well as techniques have
been developed which can easily identify complex patterns in the data which will be a very
tedious task to be done by a human.
Model Deployment – After a model is developed and gives better results on the holdout or
the real-world dataset then we deploy it and monitor its performance. This is the main part
where we use our learning from the data to be applied in real-world applications and use
cases.
Steps for Data Science Processes:
Step 1: Defining research goals and creating a project charter
Spend time understanding the goals and context of your research. Continue asking questions
and devising examples until you grasp the exact business expectations, identify how your
project fits in the bigger picture, appreciate how your research is going to change the
business, and understand how they’ll use your results.
Create a project charter
A project charter requires teamwork, and your input covers at least the following:
 A clear research goal
 The project mission and context
 How you’re going to perform your analysis
 What resources you expect to use
 Proof that it’s an achievable project, or proof of concepts
 Deliverables and a measure of success
 A timeline
Step 2: Retrieving Data
Start with data stored within the company
 Finding data even within your own company can sometimes be a challenge.
 This data can be stored in official data repositories such as databases, data marts, data
warehouses, and data lakes maintained by a team of IT professionals.
 Getting access to the data may take time and involve company policies.
Step 3: Cleansing, integrating, and transforming data-
Cleaning:
Data cleansing is a subprocess of the data science process that focuses on removing errors in
your data so your data becomes a true and consistent representation of the processes it
originates from.
The first type is the interpretation error, such as incorrect use of terminologies, like saying
that a person’s age is greater than 300 years.
The second type of error points to inconsistencies between data sources or against your
company’s standardized values. An example of this class of errors is putting “Female” in one
table and “F” in another when they represent the same thing: that the person is female.
Integrating:
Combining Data from different Data Sources.
Your data comes from several different places, and in this sub step we focus on integrating
these different sources.
You can perform two operations to combine information from different data sets. The first
operation is joining and the second operation is appending or stacking.
Joining Tables:
Joining tables allows you to combine the information of one observation found in one table
with the information that you find in another table.
Appending Tables:

Appending or stacking tables is effectively adding observations from one table to another
table.
Transforming Data
Certain models require their data to be in a certain shape.
Reducing the Number of Variables
Sometimes you have too many variables and need to reduce the number because they don’t
add new information to the model.
Having too many variables in your model makes the model difficult to handle, and certain
techniques don’t perform well when you overload them with too many input variables.
Dummy variables can only take two values: true(1) or false(0). They’re used to indicate the
absence of a categorical effect that may explain the observation.
Step 4: Exploratory Data Analysis
During exploratory data analysis you take a deep dive into the data.
Information becomes much easier to grasp when shown in a picture, therefore you mainly use
graphical techniques to gain an understanding of your data and the interactions between
variables.
Bar Plot, Line Plot, Scatter Plot ,Multiple Plots , Pareto Diagram , Link and Brush
Diagram ,Histogram , Box and Whisker Plot .
Step 5: Build the Models
Build the models are the next step, with the goal of making better predictions, classifying
objects, or gaining an understanding of the system that are required for modeling.
Step 6: Presenting findings and building applications on top of them –
The last stage of the data science process is where your soft skills will be most useful, and
yes, they’re extremely important.
Presenting your results to the stakeholders and industrializing your analysis process for
repetitive reuse and integration with other tools.
Benefits and uses of data science and big data
Governmental organizations are also aware of data’s value. A data scientist in a governmental
organization gets to work on diverse projects such as detecting fraud and other criminal
activity or optimizing project funding.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also no strangers to using data. They use it to
raise money and defend their causes. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), for instance,
employs data scientists to increase the effectiveness of their fundraising efforts.
Universities use data science in their research but also to enhance the study experience of
their students. • Ex: MOOC’s- Massive open online courses.
Tools for Data Science Process
As time has passed tools to perform different tasks in Data Science have evolved to a great
extent. Different software like Matlab and Power BI, and programming Languages like
Python and R Programming Language provides many utility features which help us to
complete most of the most complex task within a very limited time and efficiently. Some of
the tools which are very popular in this domain of Data Science are shown in the below
image.
Usage of Data Science Process
The Data Science Process is a systematic approach to solving data-related problems and
consists of the following steps:
Problem Definition: Clearly defining the problem and identifying the goal of the analysis.
Data Collection: Gathering and acquiring data from various sources, including data cleaning
and preparation.
Data Exploration: Exploring the data to gain insights and identify trends, patterns, and
relationships.
Data Modeling: Building mathematical models and algorithms to solve problems and make
predictions.
Evaluation: Evaluating the model’s performance and accuracy using appropriate metrics.
Deployment: Deploying the model in a production environment to make predictions or
automate decision-making processes.
Monitoring and Maintenance: Monitoring the model’s performance over time and making
updates as needed to improve accuracy.
Issues of Data Science Process
Data Quality and Availability: Data quality can affect the accuracy of the models developed
and therefore, it is important to ensure that the data is accurate, complete, and consistent.
Data availability can also be an issue, as the data required for analysis may not be readily
available or accessible.
Bias in Data and Algorithms: Bias can exist in data due to sampling techniques, measurement
errors, or imbalanced datasets, which can affect the accuracy of models. Algorithms can also
perpetuate existing societal biases, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes.
Model Overfitting and Underfitting: Overfitting occurs when a model is too complex and fits
the training data too well, but fails to generalize to new data. On the other hand, underfitting
occurs when a model is too simple and is not able to capture the underlying relationships in
the data.
Model Interpretability: Complex models can be difficult to interpret and understand, making
it challenging to explain the model’s decisions and decisions. This can be an issue when it
comes to making business decisions or gaining stakeholder buy-in.
Privacy and Ethical Considerations: Data science often involves the collection and analysis of
sensitive personal information, leading to privacy and ethical concerns. It is important to
consider privacy implications and ensure that data is used in a responsible and ethical
manner.
Technical Challenges: Technical challenges can arise during the data science process such as
data storage and processing, algorithm selection, and computational scalability.