Chapter 2. Getting Started with Data Science
Data science is not a single science as much as it is a collection of various scientific disciplines integrated for the purpose of analyzing data. These disciplines include various statistical and mathematical techniques, including:
- Computer science
- Data engineering
- Visualization
- Domain-specific knowledge and approaches
With the advent of cheaper storage technology, more and more data has been collected and stored permitting previously unfeasible processing and analysis of data. With this analysis came the need for various techniques to make sense of the data. These large sets of data, when used to analyze data and identify trends and patterns, become known as big data.
This in turn gave rise to cloud computing and concurrent techniques such as map-reduce, which distributed the analysis process across a large number of processors, taking advantage of the power of parallel processing.
The process of analyzing big data is not simple and evolves to the...
