Data Science is a field that has been gaining traction for quite some time now. But how to approach it and what is the hell is it ?!! Let me take you through a very silly but effective way of learning about this interesting new subject.
What have I done ;)?
Videos. I like them so much not only because reading is frustrating sometimes but also because with videos you can see the actual result of life. with videos, you can see another human being trying to learn something and using the tools, and producing results. that is why I started with YouTube.
YouTube your way into the world by simply searching what the subject is and in my case I only typed “Data Science”. what amazed me is the number of videos ranging from general topics to very specific details into mathematics, number theory, analysis …. etc.
Now what I did was first watching as many videos as I possibly could about everything. I watched about Data Science applications, fields of study, jobs, salaries, … and many more. I got overwhelmed with that many details about it and stopped for a while to think.
The Thinking ;)
It was clear to me after I watched that many videos that Data Science is a mix and match of many fields working together to help decision-makers make clear decisions based on the analysis of huge or small data-sets. But wait isn’t that Statistics and Data Analysis ?!
interesting questions :) Data Analysis is I think a part of Data Science. As I understand so far the reason Data Science got that name was how big and branching it is. think about the word science .. it is so vast chemistry, physics, math … etc and every branch has tons of other branches as well. so Data science got that name to illustrate that what we need is more than just reading from a data source and plotting something on a graph. it is an overall encompassing field of many other fields that aim to ultimately use and understand data that will drive us Human beings to a more sustainable world through efficiency.
Time for action
Many other questions to go but I think it is time to stop and actually do something. So after checking what people do and what tools they use on the most basic level I got the following:
- People usually use Python programming langue (so far)
- People use something called “Jupyter Notebooks” which from the name I gathered is some kind of a notebook to store and share the work they do. and it was ;)
- simply thought about the most basic thing I can do which it read from some file and draw a graph that displays that data. so i gathered some data about the world population from (1952–2007) sorted by country with a simple google search I got an excel file.
- I read before about data adaptation and cleaning is a big part of what we do as data scientists ;) so I made sure the file was not corrupted and changed it to CSV format.
- installed and ran Jupyter as in tutorial in the links attached and started my journey trying to draw a simple graph plotting that data on a graph. it was really easy even if you don’t have programming experience Python kinda reads like a human language.
- I had the graph attached below and just like that I became a minor minor minor tiny data scientist .. Horaaaaaay
watch this and to be continued ……… ;)
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