When Quantum Computation Meets Data Science: Making Data Science Quantum · Issue 4.1, Winter 2022

The interface of statistics and computation is a signature issue in data science, which characteristically uses statistics, computation, and domain science knowledge to extract information and insights from data for the solving of big data problems. The discovery of solutions to complicated real problems with big data requires the development of statistical methods to analyze the data and computational algorithms to implement data analysis procedures. The statistical analysis is often computationally challenging. For example, statistical approaches that are mathematically optimal may not be computationally tractable, and data analysis methods that are computationally efficient may not be statistically optimal. Thus, sound statistics and tractable computation constitute fundamental but often competing pillars of data science, and a tradeoff is needed to balance statistical efficiency and computation efficiency.