Breaking Data Science Open

Chapter 1. How Data Science Entered Everyday Business

Business intelligence (BI) has been evolving for decades as data has become cheaper, easier to access, and easier to share. BI analysts take historical data, perform queries, and summarize findings in static reports that often include charts. The outputs of business intelligence are “known knowns” that are manifested in stand-alone reports examined by a single business analyst or shared among a few managers.

Predictive analytics has been unfolding on a parallel track to business intelligence. With predictive analytics, numerous tools allow analysts to gain insight into “known unknowns,” such as where their future competitors will come from. These tools track trends and make predictions, but are often limited to specialized programs designed for statisticians and mathematicians.

Data science is a multidisciplinary field that combines the latest innovations in advanced analytics, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, with high-performance computing and visualizations. The tools of data science originated in the scientific community, where researchers used them to test and verify hypotheses that include “unknown unknowns,” and they have entered business, government, and other organizations gradually over the past decade as computing costs have shrunk and software has grown in sophistication. The finance industry was an early adopter of data science. Now it is a mainstay of retail, city planning, political campaigns, ...