Chapter 1
The Five Areas of Data Science
IN THIS CHAPTER
What is data science?
What is big data?
What are the five steps of data science?
Data science impacts our modern lives in far more ways than you may think. When you use Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo, you are using a very sophisticated application of data science. The suggestions for other search terms that come up when you are typing? Those come from data science.
Medical diagnoses and interpretations of images and symptoms are examples of data science. Doctors rely on data science interpretations more and more these days.
As with most of the topics in this book, data science looks intimidating to the uninitiated. Inferences, data graphs, and statistics, oh my! However, just as in our previous chapters on artificial intelligence, if you dig in and look at some examples, you can really get a handle on what data science is and what it isn’t.
In this chapter we cover just enough statistics and “asking questions of data” to get you going and get some simple results. The purpose is to introduce you to the use of Python in data science and talk about just enough theory to get you started.
If nothing else, we want to leave you with ...
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