How to do Data Science

This blog post is authored by Brandon Rohrer, Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft. The raw stuff of data science is a collection of numbers and names. Measurements, prices, dates, times, products, titles, actions--everything is fair game. You can use images, text, audio, video and other complex data too, as long as you have a way to reduce it to numbers and names. The mechanics of getting data can be quite complex. But this guide is focused on the data science, so I'll leave that topic for another time. Data science is the process of using names and numbers to answer a question.