Data science, the ability to sift through massive amounts of data to discover hidden patterns and predict future trends, may be in demand, but it requires an understanding of many different elements of data analysis.
Extracting actionable knowledge from all your data to make decisions and predictions requires a number of skills, from statistics and programming to data visualization and business domain expertise.
At Data Summit 2019 Chris Matthais, Principal Data Consultants; Caserta, Bill Walrond, Principal Data Consultants, Caserta, presented “Data Science Best Practices” during their workshop session.
The sixth annual Data Summit conference is being held in Boston, May 21-22, 2019, with pre-conference workshops on May 20.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of data analysis, availability, and technology,” Walrond said.
Data is the differentiator, Walrond explained.
“If you don’t have data as your core strategy, your competitor definitely does,” Walrond said.
In terms of understanding the customer journey what’s new is that businesses now have the capability to match all digital touch points with something visual and those digital touch points have multiplied, he explained.
“During this whole process we are able to collect data to find out what the customer is doing,” Walrond said.
Companies are more crippled by their data as opposed to being liberated by it, Matthais said.
“It behooves us to continue to try and utilize data well,” Walrond said.
The data science environment has changed and there are more players to help enterprises get the most of their data. With cloud resources this bigger group of team players has nearly unlimited resources to work with data, according to Walrond.
“We need a methodology to learn about all this data we’re collecting,” Walrond said. “Data scientists spend a lot of time cleaning up data so we can find out what’s wrong with it.”
Today’s data science pipeline includes modern data engineering. To begin businesses should have a plan on what they want to accomplish, Wlrond said.
Gathering requirements and fostering relationships are the next steps to uncovering data with data science. Preparing the data for ingesting and cleansing helps remove bad data, allows businesses to handle variety of file formats, and more.
Many Data Summit 2019 presentations are available for review at https://www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2019/Presentations.aspx.