Saman Siadati

Many statisticians, including Nate Silver, have argued that data science is not a new field, but rather another name for statistics. Others argue that data science is distinct from statistics because it focuses on problems and techniques unique to digital data. Vasant Dhar writes that statistics emphasizes quantitative data and description. In contrast, data science deals with quantitative and qualitative data (e.g. images) and emphasizes prediction and action. Andrew Gelman of Columbia University and data scientist Vincent Granville have described statistics as a nonessential part of data science. 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.

Data science is an interdisciplinary field focused on extracting knowledge from data sets, which are typically large (see big data). The field encompasses analysis, preparing data for analysis, and presenting findings to inform high-level decisions in an organization. As such, it incorporates skills from computer science, mathematics, statistics, information visualization, graphic design, and business. Statistician Nathan Yau, drawing on Ben Fry, also links data science to human-computer interaction: users should be able to intuitively control and explore data. In 2015, the American Statistical Association identified database management, statistics, and machine learning, and distributed and parallel systems as the three emerging foundational professional communities. Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data. Data science is related to ...