In this article, I clarify the various roles of the data scientist, and how data science compares and overlaps with related fields such as machine learning, deep learning, AI, statistics, IoT, operations research, and applied mathematics. As data science is a broad discipline, I start by describing the different types of data scientists that one may encounter in any business setting: you might even discover that you are a data scientist yourself, without knowing it. As in any scientific discipline, data scientists may borrow techniques from related disciplines, though we have developed our own arsenal, especially techniques and algorithms to handle very large unstructured data sets in automated ways, even without human interactions, to perform transactions in real-time or to make predictions.
1. Different Types of Data Scientists
To get started and gain some historical perspective, you can read my article about 9 types of data scientists, published in 2014, or my article where I compare data science with 16 analytic disciplines, also published in 2014.The following articles, published during the same time period, are still useful:
- Data Scientist versus Data Architect
- Data Scientist versus Data Engineer
- Data Scientist versus Statistician
- Data Scientist versus Business Analyst
More recently (August 2016) Ajit Jaokar discussed Type A (Analytics) versus Type B (Builder) data scientist:
- The Type A Data Scientist can code well enough to work with data but is not necessarily an expert. The Type A data scientist may be an expert in experimental design, forecasting, modelling, statistical inference, or other things typically taught in statistics departments. Generally speaking though, the work product of a data scientist is not "p-values and confidence intervals" as academic statistics sometimes seems to suggest (and as it sometimes is for traditional statisticians working in the pharmaceutical industry, for example). At Google, Type A Data Scientists are known variously as Statistician, Quantitative Analyst, Decision Support Engineering Analyst, or Data Scientist, and probably a few more.
- Type B Data Scientist: The B is for Building. Type B Data Scientists share some statistical background with Type A, but they are also very strong coders and may be trained software engineers. The Type B Data Scientist is mainly interested in using data "in production." They build models which interact with users, often serving recommendations (products, people you may know, ads, movies, search results). Source: click here.
I also wrote about the ABCD's of business processes optimization where D stands for data science, C for computer science, B for business science, and A for analytics science. Data science may or may not involve coding or mathematical practice, as you can read in my article on low-level versus high-level data science. In a startup, data scientists generally wear several hats, such as executive, data miner, data engineer or architect, researcher, statistician, modeler (as in predictive modeling) or developer.
Continue reading here: Difference between Machine Learning and Data Science