Data Analyst / Data Scientist (Remote)

Data science is aninterdisciplinary field that usesscientific methods, processes,algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolateknowledge and insights from noisy, structured andunstructured data,^[1][2] and apply knowledge from data across a broad range of application domains. Data science is related todata mining,machine learning,big data,computational statistics andanalytics.^[3]

Data science is a "concept to unifystatistics,data analysis,informatics, and their relatedmethods" in order to "understand and analyse actualphenomena" withdata.^[4] It uses techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the context ofmathematics, statistics,computer science,information science, anddomain knowledge.^[3] However, data science is different fromcomputer science and information science.Turing Award winnerJim Gray imagined data science as a "fourth paradigm" of science (empirical,theoretical,computational, and now data-driven) and asserted that "everything about science is changing because of the impact ofinformation technology" and thedata deluge.^[5][6]

A data scientist is someone who creates programming code and combines it with statistical knowledge to create insights from data.^[7]

Many statisticians, includingNate Silver, have argued that data science is not a new field, but rather another name for statistics.^[15] Others argue that data science is distinct from statistics because it focuses on problems and techniques unique to digital data.^[16] Vasant Dhar writes that statistics emphasizes quantitative data and description. In contrast, data science deals with quantitative and qualitative data (e.g. from images, text, sensors, transactions or customer information, etc) and emphasizes prediction and action.^[17] Andrew Gelman ofColumbia University has described statistics as a nonessential part of data science.^[18]

Stanford professor David Donoho writes that data science is not distinguished from statistics by the size of datasets or use of computing and that many graduate programs misleadingly advertise their analytics and statistics training as the essence of a data-science program. He describes data science as an applied field growing out of traditional statistics.^[19]