The skills you need to become a Data Scientist

Data Science is a simple definition for a complex series of activity.

Data Scientists are people able to find hidden meaning in a big quantity of data (Big Data).
"What is the average age of mint toothpaste buyers? Where they live? " is just a simple question that could be very important for a supermarket company or a toothpaste dealer. And the data needed to answer to this question can be anywhere (ex in the fidelity card databases).

With an information like this they can decide where and how much of their product must be placed for sale.

A person, or better a team, that wants to perform a good analysis must have those skills:

• Computer science: needed to manipulate tons of data, to "clean" bad data and give them uniformity. Fundamental to perform statistical and other calculations to extract meaning from data.

• Math: almost all the instruments (mainly statistics) involve math: a good confidence with math is really useful for Data Science.

• Statistics: statistic is fundamental to interpretate data distributions and predict how they will go in the future.

• Machine learning: is a branch of computer science that, using statistics, let the programmer write code that is able to learn from data how to use themselves

• Domain expertise: knowledge of the environment where the data come from is very important. Data cannot be split from reality. The first step for a Data Science project is to explore the industry or shop or environment to understand as deeply as we can how it really works.

• Communication and presentation skills: the results must be explained to the end user to get meaning. Maybe the end user is just the owner of a small or big business, maybe is the marketing team that needs data analysis to perform targeted marketing campaigns. A good presentation of the results is mandatory.

• Data visualization: graphs, bar charts, pie charts, tables, pictures ... Anything needed to present the results of the analysis must be readable, clear and, why not, beautiful. Infographic, graphs, slides ... all is admitted.