Data science is an interdisciplinary field that combines social sciences, advanced statistics, and computer engineering skills to acquire, store, organize, and analyze information across a variety of sources. The primary goal of the data scientist is to pose meaningful questions that can be answered by data, discover actionable insights through analysis, and to present findings in a clear way to drive specific outcomes. The role of a data scientist requires an understanding of both the technical and the business meaning in an enterprise’s data, and the analytics skills to find answers.
Data science relies heavily on tools and technologies developed in academia—such as R and Python, both of which have extensive analytical and statistical libraries readily available—and a growing selection of commercial products provided by a wide variety of vendors.