“Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice.”
Stephen Few
When thinking of data sciences as the field that’s impacting worldwide businesses with ever-increasing force. As the name suggests, it becomes evident that the humungous data generated every second demand an experienced data science professional to master the timely delivery of key business insights. Procuring the right numbers is not enough, data science is more than just number play. It is about inferring pivotal business insights that are leveraged with the highest possible returns in the longer term.
As a keen data science aspirant, you must have been struck with questions such as;
“How much is too much Math for a data scientist?”
Or
“Can I become a data science professional with little or no mathematical background?”
Indeed, Math is a prerequisite for entering the data science industry. Data science is a large field of operation with many disciplines residing beneath and within it. Although mathematics is one of the subjects that scares many of us; the ones interested in Data sciences are usually keen on mastering mathematical skills.
Your competence in popular programming languages is the game changer that would set your data science career trajectory in the higher realm. Ggplot2, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Caret, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Keras are the most common packages for descriptive and predictive analytics. With Python, Java, R, Scala, C++, and many other programming languages commanding the data industry and key business insights today, it automatically necessitates the essential role of numeric competence.
Is Math a key data scientist skill?
A Data science career requires mathematical skills helping in managing machine learning algorithms, and performing analysis and discovering insights from data require math. While math is not the only requirement, but one of the most important. Quantitative reasoning skills form the basis of essential day-to-day tasks performed by a data scientist. So, the clear answer is a YES!
What Mathematical concepts are popular with data scientists?
A wide range of mathematical concepts forms a concrete grounding for beginning your data science career from the scratch. The areas you should focus on as a data science aspirant involve:
- Statistics:
Statistics is a valuable tool utilized by certified data scientists. It has a key role to play in machine learning models to assist in understanding varied scenarios. It is at the core of sophisticated ML algorithms, captivating and translating data patterns into actionable evidence. It allows gathering, reviewing, analyzing, and drawing conclusions with ease; alongside quantifying mathematical models to appropriate variables.
- Linear Algebra
It is a mathematical foundation that solves the misrepresentation of data as well as wrong computation. it provides concepts that are crucial to many areas of computer science; including graphics, image processing, cryptography, ML, computer vision, web search, and much more.
- Calculus
Data science professionals use calculus for almost every model, the popular being Gradient Descent. It is absolutely at the core of understanding linear algebra and statistics; that helps in improving intuition for how this work.
How is Math incorporated into Data science?
As a certified data scientist, you are leveraged with the responsibility of analyzing the data for actionable insights. Specific tasks such as identifying the data-analytics problems offer the greatest opportunities to the organization. You are a key pivot to the multitudinous growth of any organization. Their job profile broadly revolves around mining, analyzing, and interpreting data; which involves a good amount of knowledge at every step. Let’s look at the way mathematics is incorporated into core data scientist’s techniques;
- Clustering
This involves grouping the data and also a lot of statistics and calculus runs behind this technique. To name a few- K-means algorithm and Mean-shift clustering.
- Regression
Making data-driven predictions is made possible by Regression. Concepts like linear regressions and Multivariate regressions come in handy; while dealing with both linear algebra and statistics.
- Classification
Classification techniques to sort data are built on mathematics. Such as- K-nearest neighbor classification is built around calculus formulas and linear algebra.
- Optimization methods
Most ML algorithms perform predictive modeling by minimizing an objective function, thereby learning the weights that must be applied to the testing data in order to obtain the predicted labels.
Types of Data science queries Mathematics target to resolve:
Mathematics is the sole answer to be applied to a variety of data science queries. Listed below are some of them- Anomaly Detection, A/B testing, Algorithm, Linear Modeling, Time series, Machine Learning, and Quantitative Reasoning.
Data science certification programs offered by credible certification providers in the world such as MIT, Stanford, USDSI, Columbia, Georgia Tech, etc., are leveled up with key data science skills that are diverse and future-proof and are the need of the hour today. The Data Science field has become as diverse as one can imagine. Practicing a variety of skills is the key to a lasting data science career. Learning throughout is the prerequisite trait every that any recruiter looks for while appointing a skilled data science professional. Make your data science journey a promising one with the right skillsets to match the competition ahead.
