Preface
The topic of this book is data science, which is a field of study and application that has been growing rapidly for the past several decades. As a growing field, it is gaining a lot of attention in both the media as well as in the job market. The United States recently appointed its first ever chief data scientist, DJ Patil. This move was modeled after tech companies who, honestly, only recently started hiring massive data teams. These skills are in high demand and their applications extend much further than today's job market.
This book will attempt to bridge the gap between math/programming/domain expertise. Most people today have expertise in at least one of these (maybe two), but proper data science requires a little bit of all three. We will dive into topics from all three areas and solve complex problems. We will clean, explore, and analyze data in order to derive scientific and accurate conclusions. Machine learning and deep learning techniques will be applied to solve complex data tasks.