Data Science–A Systematic Treatment

There is a data-driven revolution under way in science and society, disrupting every form of enterprise. We are collecting and storing data more rapidly than ever before. The value of data as a central asset in an organization is now well established and generally accepted. The Economist called data "the world's most valuable resource."40 The World Economic Forum's briefing paper, A New Paradigm for Business of Data, states "At the heart of digital economy and society is the explosion of insight, intelligence and information--data."5 The field of data science is expected to enable data to be leveraged for making better decisions and achieving more meaningful outcomes. Although the term data science has some history, in its current incarnation as a modern field of study, it has already had significant economic impact. A 2015 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report identified "data-driven innovation" (DDI) as having a central driving role in 21st century economies, defining DDI as "the use of data and analytics to improve and foster new products, processes, organisational methods and markets." Data science deployments are still what might be called first generation, but their impact is already being felt in many areas: global sustainability,11 power and energy systems,25 biological and biomedical systems,38 health sciences and health informatics,12 finance and insurance,8 smart cities,33 digital humanities,28 and more. The last decade has established the terms "big data," "data analytics," and "data science" into our lexicon, both as buzzwords and as important fields of study. Interest in the topic, as evidenced by Google Trends (see Figure 1), has exploded over the same period. An increasing number of countries have released policy statements related to data science. In academia, data-science programs and research institutes have been established with significant speed, while many industrial organizations have created data-science units.