O’Reilly just surveyed 250 data scientists about their skills and came up with the four types of data scientist--and one shocking outside finding. For a profession whose entire “raison d’etre” is quantitative analysis, the role of the data scientist has been surprisingly hard to pin down. Now a new ebook from O’Reilly, Analyzing the Analyzers, has surveyed 250 Data Scientists on how they see themselves and their work. The authors then applied the tools of their trade, in this case a Non-negative Matrix Factorization algorithm to cluster the data, revealing the four archetypes of the data scientist. It also found that most Data Scientists, no matter which group they fell into, “rarely work with terabyte or larger data.” We think that terms like “data scientist,” “analytics,” and “big data” are the result of what one might call a “buzzword meat grinder.” We’ll use the survey results to identify a new, more precise vocabulary for talking about their work, based on how data scientists describe themselves and their skills. So who are these new data scientists? A Data Businessperson is focused on how data insights can affect a company’s bottom line or “translates P-values into profits”. This group seems very similar to the old-school Data Analyst, whose skills have sometimes been unjustly discounted in the pursuit of the more fashionable Data Scientist. In fact, only about a quarter of this group described themselves as Data Scientists. Nearly a quarter are female, a much... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2013-07-03 00:00:00 UTC ]