Those who enter university today must be aware of the prospects of the career choice they make. With the cost of a college education, soaring, understanding the financial prospects of a career choice can make the difference in whether you will be able to pay back the student loans you will likely have to take for your education. And whether you will have a job that can support you throughout your working career.
In terms of picking a high paying and in-demand career, data scientist is near the top of the list. It is a career that is at the heart of new catch phrases like Big Data and Analytics which are being used to understand how to position products, services and relationships with customers and vendors. They are also key in the public sector where governments have to become more efficient with the allocation of their resources. For these reasons and several others, data scientist is an in-demand career and enrolling in a data scientist course can gain you access to a career that will be in high demand for the foreseeable future. Here is an explanation of the career and what skills you need to become a data scientist.
What is a Data Scientist?
A data scientist is a professional whose job has grown in importance as the collection and interpretation of data has become more central to the private businesses, non-profits and the public sectors of society.
Data scientists are experts at interpreting and mining meaning from collected data. The discipline requires a complex set of skills including knowledge of machine learning, statistics, specialized data software and lots of concentration. The methods include collecting, cleaning and munging data in order to ensure the data is as clean as possible. The data scientist will always expect that there are biases in the data and as a result will need to understand how to account for those biases utilizing data analysis tools and strategies that incorporate visualization and data sense.
A data science ultimately looks for patterns or trends and then build models based on these trends that will help to predict outcomes for the data set. The data scientist may design experiments, offer hypothesis and function as a critical component of any data-driven decision making. They can expect to work as part of a team that then interacts with other groups which may be engineers, researchers and other who work with data. In this mi the data scientist must provide leadership in clear language for the entire group.
Here are some specifics skills you will need to master as a data scientist:
Computer Programming
Understanding statistical programming is an important skill for the job. The leading languages are Python and R and the top database querying language is SQL. Knowledge of these and other key languages are very important.
Understanding of Statistics
With statistics being so important to so many companies today, a good data scientist must understand maximum likelihood estimators, distributions, statistical tests, and other valid approaches. This data is used to develop strategies and to help make important decisions about product and service development.
Machine Learning
Many companies today have products or services that are completely data driven and they rely heavily on machine learning methods. These methods rely on algorithms and include k-nearest neighbors, random forests, ensemble methods, and more.
Data scientists also need to be well versed in: Data Intuition, Data Wrangling, Data Visualization Multivariable Calculus & Linear Algebra each of these is taught at a reputable data scientist university course.