by Angela Guess
Bob Hayes recently wrote in Business2Community, “Gil Press offers an excellent summary of the field of data science. According to Press, the term, data science, first appears in use in 1974. He concludes that data science is way of extracting insights from data using the powers of computer science and statistics applied to data from a specific field of study. Additionally, in our research, we found that, data science skills can be grouped into three skills areas: (1) Subject Matter Expertise, (2) Technology/Programming, (3) Statistics/Math. To improve your chances of finding insights from your Big Data projects, you’ll need to apply all three of these skills. But how do these skills contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon we are studying? We turn to the scientific method.”
Hayes goes on, “The scientific method is body of techniques for objectively investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. This method includes the collection of empirical evidence, subject to specific principles of reasoning. The scientific method follows these five general steps: (1) Formulate a question or problem statement. (2) Generate a hypothesis that is testable. (3) Gather/Generate data to understand the phenomenon in question. Data can be generated through experimentation; when we can’t conduct true experiments, data are obtained through observations and measurements. (4) Analyze data to test the hypotheses / Draw conclusions. (5) Communicate results to interested parties or take action (e.g., change processes) based on the conclusions. Additionally, the outcome of the scientific method can help us refine our hypotheses for further testing.”
photo credit: Business Over Broadway