Data Science

by John D. Kelleher

The goal of data science is to improve decision making by basing decisions on insights extracted from large data sets. As a field of activity, data science encompasses a set of principles, problem definitions, algorithms, and processes for extracting nonobvious and useful patterns from large data sets. It is closely related to the fields of data mining and machine learning, but it is broader in scope. Today, data science drives decision making in nearly all parts of modern societies. Some of the ways that data science may affect your daily life include determining which advertisements are presented to you online; which movies, books, and friend connections are recommended to you; which emails are filtered into your spam folder; what offers you receive when you renew your cell phone service; the cost of your health insurance premium; the sequencing and timing of traffic lights in your area; how the drugs you may need were designed; and which locations in your city the police are targeting. The growth in use of data science across our societies is driven by the emergence of big data and social media, the speedup in computing power, the massive reduction in the cost of computer memory, and the development of more powerful