Putting the “science” in data science
In the time since the first edition of Machine Learning with R was published, a new phrase has become somewhat ubiquitous within the field of machine learning. That buzzword, of course, is data science—a term that has been defined by many but is generally agreed to describe a field of work or study encapsulating aspects of statistics, data preparation and visualization, subject-matter expertise, as well as machine learning.
It is debatable whether data science is synonymous with what used to be called data mining, but it is safe to assume that there is a lot of overlap between the two. A reasonable outsider might observe that data science is simply a more formalized version of data mining. The methods and techniques in data mining were often learned informally on the job or passed between practitioners at industry events. This is in stark contrast to the field of data science, which offers countless opportunities to earn...
