I have an internal idea of what some differences are but these terms seem to get thrown around arbitrarily by laypeople and I’d appreciate if people that work in/around these fields could give a simple and precise answer here.
In: Technology
Informatics is the most general out of the three. It’s synonymous with computer science, and includes pretty much everything about computers. Algorithms, software engineering, cryptography, hardware engineering, AI, whatever you can think of.
Data Science and Data Analytics are very similar to each other. They are a subset of computer science, and are about the extraction of knowledge from data. For example, imagine you’re Google. You’ve tracked a bunch of data from your users and want to learn something about them. That’s a job for data scientists and data analysts.
The difference is that data analytics is more about answering actual questions, while data science is more open and has a broader scope. To stay with the previous example, a data scientist might take the data and build a model that can predict a user’s action depending on what ad you show them. Meanwhile, a data analyst would use the data to answer a question such as “How many of our users are influenced by our ads”. But in the end, there isn’t really a hard border between data science and data analytics, and it’s sometimes hard to say where one starts and the other ends.
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