Data science

Data science is the discipline of extracting actionable knowledge from data of various forms. The name data science emerged quite recently--it was invented by DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher and popularized in the article Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century in 2012. But the discipline itself had existed before for quite a while and previously was known by other names such as data mining or predictive analytics. Data science, like its predecessors, is built on statistics and machine learning algorithms for knowledge extraction and model building.

The science part of the term data science is no coincidence--if we look up science, its definition can be summarized to systematic organization of knowledge in terms testable explanations and predictions. This is exactly what data scientists do, by extracting patterns from available data, they can make predictions about future unseen data, and they make sure the predictions are validated beforehand. 

Nowadays, data science...