I’ve been hearing about this career field, and the language used to describe it is complicated. I need to understand what these people do. Are you the people who take people’s browser information and use it to shove ads down their throats?
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Data scientists generally are scientists applying the scientific method but to data rather than traditional experiments. This includes analytics, for example a company investigating why a certian product did not sell well. Advertising is another application as you mentioned. Generally machine learning and AI involve data science as well.
Data Analyst: given the company data, see where we are spending the most and how are we comparing to our competitors.
Data Scientist: given the company data, define and execute experiments to decrease customer churn
Analytics Engineer: given the raw data, make it easily useable for data analysts and data scientists
So a factory puts out huge amounts of data per day. An industrial data scientist takes that data and uses it to create an early warning system for the quality department, that #4 tool on line 3 is drifting out of control and needs fixed.
So a lab creates pretty large amounts of data per day. In R&D a data scientist takes the engineers’ question ‘Which of these 10 factors is most important to my product design?’ and puts together an experiment shaped like one of those old-fashioned logic puzzles to work out which factor is most important without running colossal quantities of experiments. The engineers run the experiment but the data scientist tells them what happened when they did.
So Facebook creates a *mindboggling* quantity of data per day. A data scientist takes the huge individual data vectors for each user, the huge output metrics of which adverts people looked at or clicked on and whether any of that created sales, and writes an AI to link the best adverts to the right users.
An old joke: “a data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco.”
Both data scientists and statisticians make sense of data sets. “data scientist” is a newer, hipper name for people who do that.
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