Data Science

Data science, also known as data-driven science, is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to data mining.

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.

The term "data science" (originally used interchangeably with "datalogy") has existed for over thirty years and was used initially as a substitute for computer science by Peter Naur in 1960. In 1974, Naur published Concise Survey of Computer Methods, which freely used the term data science in its survey of the contemporary data processing methods that are used in a wide range of applications.

In 1996, members of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) met in Kobe for their biennial conference. Here, for the first time, the term data science is included in the title of the conference ("Data Science, classification, and related methods"), after the term was introduced in a roundtable discussion by Chikio Hayashi.

In November 1997, C.F. Jeff Wu gave the inaugural lecture entitled "Statistics = Data Science?"for his appointment to the H. C. Carver Professorship at the University of Michigan. In this lecture, he characterized statistical work as a trilogy of data collection, data modeling and analysis, and decision making. In his conclusion, he initiated the modern, non-computer science, usage of the term "data science" and advocated that statistics be renamed data science and statisticians data scientists. Later, he presented his lecture entitled "Statistics = Data Science?" as the first of his 1998 P.C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lectures. These lectures honor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, an Indian scientist and statistician and founder of the Indian Statistical Institute.