Who are these Computational Data Geeks? If I would ask ”who do you think about when I say computational data scientist?”, you might think of Maurice Moss (IT crowd), Sheldon (Big Bang Theory), Wesley Crusher (Star Trek) or just ”sorry, what?”.
Well, let me explain who these people are and what they can do for you.
People working in Computational Data Science (CDS) are fairly normal human beings who use mathematics to find patterns and explain the real world and communicate their results in a simple way. Their main interest is using (big) data to explain situations or answer questions, and frequently use data visualisation tools to guide their way through these exploraions.
Great, so you can give a data scientist a dataset and they will show you nice graphs and
figures of some analysis they did ... Well, yes, but in order to start, a data scientist needs
questions and problems to solve. And this is where the specialist comes in. Data scientists rely
heavily on specialists who are experts in a particular field and who understand the problems
that need to be solved and the questions that need to be asked. It is then they turn to the data
scientist who will use data to answer these questions. Most of these scientists have had a PhD
training which has taught them how to think thoroughly about a given problem, looking at it from
all the possible angles. Others, have learned to embrace the scientific method through experience.
Whichever their background, they combine different skills to extract knowledge from the patterns in the data and thereby inform business decisions. Innovation is the result of the golden combination of CDS and specialists.
The popularity of CDS is a result of the increasing advances in the computational power of our machines and in the capability to store large datasets. Although some might argue that the field of CDS is just a new and fancy name for statistics, the increased capability of computers make CDS more of a version 2.0 of statistics. In addition, data scientists use data mining, predictive analytics, mathematical algorithms and knowledge about computer and information science in order to solve the expert’s question.
Can they solve the wavefunction of the universe? That might be a big ask... Of course, they can’t solve all your problems. Being different from a IT or software development person, a data scientist can help you with:
Computational data scientists are not unicorns but their skills represent the perfect symbiosis between statistics, data, science and programming, with an open eye to business. They can help you out a lot by giving insights into your business, applications or predicting performance. Although computational data scientists are pretty cool people, you need to formulate the question that need to be answered. In addition, a CDS needs a specialist's help to gain more knowledge about the problem, and this collaboration between a specialist and CDS is key to get things rolling.