What is data science?
Data science is a method to glean insights from structured and unstructured data using approaches ranging from statistical analysis to machine learning (ML). For most organizations, it’s employed to transform data into value in the form of improved revenue, reduced costs, business agility, improved customer experience, developing new products, and so on. In short, data science gives the data collected by an organization a purpose.
Data science vs. data analytics
While closely related, data analytics is a component of data science, used to understand what an organization’s data looks like. Data science takes the output of analytics to solve problems. Data scientists say that investigating something with data is simply analysis, so data science takes analysis a step further to explain and solve problems. Another difference between data analytics and data science is timescale. Data analytics describes the current state of reality, whereas data science uses that data to predict and understand the future.
The benefits of data science
The business value of data science depends on organizational needs. Data science could help an organization build tools to predict hardware failures, enabling the organization to perform maintenance and prevent unplanned downtime. It could also help predict what to put on supermarket shelves, or how popular a product will be based on its attributes.
