Data Science For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1

Wrapping Your Head around Data Science

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making use of data science in different industries

Putting together different data science components

Identifying viable data science solutions to your own data challenges

Becoming more marketable by way of data science

For quite some time now, everyone has been absolutely deluged by data. It’s coming from every computer, every mobile device, every camera, and every imaginable sensor — and now it’s even coming from watches and other wearable technologies. Data is generated in every social media interaction we make, every file we save, every picture we take, and every query we submit; it’s even generated when we do something as simple as ask a favorite search engine for directions to the closest ice-cream shop.

Although data immersion is nothing new, you may have noticed that the phenomenon is accelerating. Lakes, puddles, and rivers of data have turned to floods and veritable tsunamis of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data that’s streaming from almost every activity that takes place in both the digital ...