Am I a data scientist? - Speaker Deck

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Am I a data scientist? Alyssa Frazee, Stripe @acfrazee

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Where I’m coming from Math undergrad Biostatistics PhD “Machine Learning Engineer” today Recurse Center (née Hacker School) 2010

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Am I a data scientist?

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Am I a data scientist? What do I really mean by this question?

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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?”

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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?”

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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

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What’s “data science”?

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data skills spectrum

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theoretical statistics software engineering

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theoretical statistics software engineering data science

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understanding quantitative data building a product data science

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output: numerical results output: usable software data science

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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

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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

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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.

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First: do I want to be a data scientist?

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Second: Does it matter?

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Am I on the job market? Am I hiring?

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If you decide it matters: some distinguishing features

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Intentionality about programming

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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

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Interest in schleppy- but-practical projects

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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

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Focus on concrete decision-making

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Focus on concrete decision-making less about inference and parameter estimation, more about what action should be taken

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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.

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

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

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Perspective from the other side Camp #1: Data science is just a rebranding of applied statistics. The day-to-day work is different!

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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

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Camp #3: Statistics is irrelevant to data science. Perspective from the other side

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Camp #3: Statistics is irrelevant to data science. Perspective from the other side

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Statistics and data science are overlapping. Neither is a subset of the other. Perspective from the other side

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About that identity crisis: Program intentionally and be a data scientist, if you want!

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About that identity crisis: Or don’t! Statistics is hugely important and relevant in its own right!

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● http://andrewgelman.com/2013/11/14/statistics-least- important-part-data-science/ ● http://bulletin.imstat.org/2014/09/data-science-how-is-it- different-to-statistics%E2%80%89/ ● https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the- 21st-century/ ● http://datascopeanalytics.com/blog/what-is-a-data-scientist/ Further reading: