Passion in Data Analytics
Back in 2012, Harvard Business Review stated that the job title “data scientist” will be deemed “the sexiest job of the 21st century. Since then, there has been a lot of hype about big data, Internet of Things, analytics, data science in general. The Singapore government in recent years also put a lot of funding into CITREP+ courses for non tech-savvy people like me to attend classes and understand more about the upcoming industry.
I have some background in R programming and in statistics, thanks to my formal university training. Out of pure curiosity, I started on this journey of finding out more about data science and its role in our future. People were and are saying technology is going to disrupt how many jobs in the future, and there were reports that artificial intelligence could replace a lot of menial labor and that driver-less cars would be a possibility by as early as 2020 (though 2020 is here, and in Singapore, cars are still driven by people). I wanted to see and evaluate for myself if this would become a reality.
A Misconception: Data Scientists are usually part computer scientists, part mathematician and also having business knowledge domain knowledge. There is an element of ‘story telling’, you need to be trained in data cleaning, data visualization, and also building prediction models using the data. Most data scientists have a PhD. Having a PhD is evidence that one can dive deeper into the theory rather than applying the out-of-the-box algorithms and solutions. It is akin to understanding the math models down to the fundamental level so as to allow a greater freedom of customization, and model tweaking to achieve greater statistical accuracy to the business problem at hand.
For most of us, we are likely not become full fledged ‘data scientists’ unless we are willing to invest a lot more time and energy into the deep know-how. Higher education, and the pursuit of knowledge is something that has been very interesting to me and is something I would consider in the future. For now, I focus on data analytics and that mastering coding in R and Python.
I have some of the data analytics projects and visualizations done up. The next few pages will be a showcase of the different data analytics projects that I have done. The first few forays into programming and data science will not be easy; but I think the John D. Rockefeller quote is very apt.
Enjoy.