A Beginner's Guide to Data Science

A typical job description in data science seems to be describing a Renaissance polymath, rather than a fresh graduate in the twenty-first century job market. High expectations may be particularly daunting for someone about to start their career. How can you be certain that you possess the skills necessary for a smooth and fruitful career while avoiding spending more time and effort than necessary? At its core, this question features the, famous in the machine learning community, exploration versus exploitation dilemma. Whenever faced with a new problem, a learner, be it a human, animal or AI algorithm, needs to divide their efforts between two tasks: explore the world, in order to collect all the information necessary and, exploit their knowledge by using it to solve the problem.