What kind of work product do Data Scientists produce?

August 22, 2019

What kind of work product do Data Scientists produce?

You may already know that the power of data science originates from a robust understanding of a wide range of skills including algorithms and statistics, programming, communication skills, and many other skillsets. Put simply, data science is all about applying the core skills in a systematic and disciplined manner.

If you’re an aspiring or beginner data scientist, you’ve probably gone through data scientist job responsibilities published in job openings in various job boards. They mention a lot of things which may seem a little confusing to a fresh or aspiring data scientist. In this post, we’re going to discuss exactly what kind of things do data scientists produce. Let’s have a look.

While data science is quite a varied field and the duties of data scientists are widely spread, it can be said that their work is focused on producing one key thing – discovering opportunities and solutions that can help a business attain sustainable growth.

In order to discover opportunities and solutions, a data scientist needs to perform a wide range of tasks. Let’s have a look at the common tasks.

Identifying the problems which provide the greatest opportunities to a business
Identifying proper datasets and variables
Gathering massive sets of structured and unstructured data from different sources
Cleaning and validating that data to ensure uniformity, completeness, and accuracy
Devising and implementing algorithms and models to mine big data
Analyzing that data to identify patterns and trends

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Once a data scientist has discovered opportunities and solutions, he/she needs to communicate the findings to stakeholders and colleagues, who’re not into data science, using visualization and other means.

Put simply, a data scientist is a person who makes value out of massive sets of data. Such a person fetches information proactively from disparate sources and analyzes the captured data to understand how a business performs. Additionally, data scientists often develop AI tools which automate certain processes within the organization.

The job of a data scientist comes with many definitions and it sometimes gets merged with other jobs related to the data science field. However, typically, the work of a data scientist involves producing machine learning-based processes or tools within the business, like automated lead scoring systems or recommendation engines.

Usually, the steps involved in the workflow to perform a data scientist’s responsibilities are called the data science process. This process encompasses several crucial steps. These usually include framing the problem accurately, gathering the raw data required to solve the problem, processing that raw data, exploring that data once it’s cleaned, performing in-depth analysis (this include implementing algorithms, statistical models, machine learning etc), and finally, communicating the findings of the analysis.

It’s important to understand that data science isn’t all about techniques or algorithms or programming or implementation. Instead, it’s a multi-disciplinary field which requires the practitioner to hold a concrete knowledge of translating between technology and business concerns. And that’s the key characteristic which makes the job of a data scientist so much valuable and promising.