Skip to main content

Tidyverse Skills for Data Science

Carrie Wright, Shannon E. Ellis, Stephanie C. Hicks, Roger D. Peng

Section 5.2 The Purpose of Data Science

Data science has multiple definitions. For this module we will use the definition:
🔗
Data science is the process of formulating a quantitative question that can be answered with data, collecting and cleaning the data, analyzing the data, and communicating the answer to the question to a relevant audience.
🔗
In general the data science process is iterative and the different components blend together a little bit. But for simplicity lets discretize the tasks into the following 7 steps:
🔗
  1. Define the question you want to ask the data
    🔗
    🔗
  2. Get the data
    🔗
    🔗
  3. Clean the data
    🔗
    🔗
  4. Explore the data
    🔗
    🔗
  5. Fit statistical models
    🔗
    🔗
  6. Communicate the results
    🔗
    🔗
  7. Make your analysis reproducible
    🔗
    🔗
This module is focused on three of these steps: (1) defining the question you want to ask, (4) exploring the data and (5) fitting statistical models to the data.
🔗
We have seen previously how to extract data from the web and from databases and we have seen how to clean it up and tidy the data. You also know how to use plots and graphs to visualize your data. You can think of this module as using those tools to start to answer questions using the tools you have already learned about.
🔗
🔗
PrevTopNext