Lecture 1

Question 1

What is “Data Science”?

Answer 1

Data science is a “concept to unify statistics, data analysis and their related methods” in order to “understand and analyze actual phenomena” with data.[3] It employs techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the broad areas of mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science, in particular from the subdomains of machine learning, classification, cluster analysis, data mining, databases, and visualization.

Question 2

What is data? (or What are data?)

Answer 2

• Measurements of phenomena, ideally from impartial (objective) instruments
• This gives some quantifiable objectivity
• Humans are susceptible to cognitive biases; we suffer failures of objectivity that are not obvious to us.