Data Science and Prediction

Abstract

The use of the term "Data Science" is becoming increasingly common along with "Big Data." What does Data Science mean? Is there something unique about it? What skills should a "data scientist" possess to be productive in the emerging digital age characterized by a deluge of data? What are the implications for business and for scientific inquiry? In this brief monograph I address these questions from a predictive modeling perspective.

Data science for mental health: a UK perspective on a global challenge

“…Data science is the extraction of knowledge from high-volume data, using skills in computing science, statistics and the specialist domain knowledge of experts 1 .…”

“…These are available to researchers as linked-data and are published in openaccess aggregated form 26,27 , along with primary care data 28 , 1 . Despite concerns about the speed and accuracy of these electronic data 29,30 , these resources may prove valuable for measuring real-world outcomes and assessing their mediators and predictors.…”

Big Data

“…Data Science is the systematic study of the extraction of knowledge from data (Dhar 2013). Data science aims to discover and extract actionable knowledge from the data, that is, knowledge that can be used to make decisions and predictions, not just to explain what's going on.…”

“…Despite the fact that "Big Data" as a buzzword is approaching its peak in the Gartner lifecycle (Dhar 2013), there are reasons to believe that this trend will only accelerate in the coming years. The Internet of Things is likely to lead to further data generation by several additional orders of magnitude through integrating billions of sensors that record images, audio, and video, and ever faster multicore and parallel computers producing ever more complex simulation results that need to be administered and analyzed.…”

“…A number of articles have noted that the demand for data scientists is racing ahead of supply (Dhar 2013;Davenport and Patil 2012). The power of analytics is rising while costs are falling.…”