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Am I a data scientist?

Am I a data scientist?

Slides from my talk at JSM 2015, in the session: "The Statistics Identity Crisis: Are We Really Data Scientists?" https://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2015/onlineprogram/ActivityDetails.cfm?SessionID=211266

Alyssa Frazee

August 11, 2015
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  1. Where I’m coming from Math undergrad Biostatistics PhD “Machine Learning

    Engineer” today Recurse Center (née Hacker School) 2010
  2. Am I a data scientist? What do I really mean

    by this question? Could I get a job offer with a title of “data scientist?”
  3. Am I a data scientist? What do I really mean

    by this question? Am I preparing my students to be able to get job offers with a title of “data scientist?”
  4. Am I a data scientist? What do I really mean

    by this question? Could I get a job offer with a title of “data scientist?” → sometimes implicitly industry → and sometimes specifically tech
  5. Am I a statistician? points for: • Am in a

    grad program called [bio]statistics • Know things about martingales and the delta method • Can explain what a p-value is and interpret linear regression coefficients points against: • Haven’t proved a theorem since 2011 • Spend more time writing bash scripts than inventing estimators • No publications in statistics journals
  6. Or am I a data scientist? points for: • Can

    program in more than one language • Actively use git & GitHub • Have written R packages and reproducible reports • Once made a web app and also a D3.js graph points against: • Not working in industry • Have never written a SQL query more complicated than select * from table • Understanding of Hadoop, Spark, and AWS is vague at best • Have never written production code
  7. Idea! I will listen to what experts in our field

    say! Camp #1: Data science is just a rebranding of applied statistics. Camp #2: Statistics and data science are overlapping. Neither is a subset of the other. Camp #3: Statistics is irrelevant to data science.
  8. Intentionality about programming Spending time thinking primarily about: • code

    efficiency • version control • code quality (cleanliness, modularity) • documentation / usability • unit testing • systematic debugging • giving and receiving code review • and other principles of software engineering
  9. Interest in schleppy- but-practical projects • figuring out how to

    get the data you need • combining existing tools/methods in new ways • finding the simplest solution that works in practice
  10. Camp #1: Data science is just a rebranding of applied

    statistics. Camp #2: Statistics and data science are overlapping. Neither is a subset of the other. Camp #3: Statistics is irrelevant to data science.
  11. Perspective from the other side Camp #1: Data science is

    just a rebranding of applied statistics.
  12. Perspective from the other side Camp #1: Data science is

    just a rebranding of applied statistics. Intentionality about programming
  13. Perspective from the other side Camp #1: Data science is

    just a rebranding of applied statistics. The day-to-day work is different!
  14. Perspective from the other side Last month I: • wrote

    Ruby, Scala, Coffeescript, and Python • fought with maven • backfilled some busted tables in our databases • investigated the mystery of why some of our cluster boxes are overworked • learned how to be on call (so I can fix some of Stripe if it breaks at 3am) • helped teach a SQL class • and did some statistics
  15. Statistics and data science are overlapping. Neither is a subset

    of the other. Perspective from the other side