# A computer scientist’s perspective on data science

Summary: The subject of this course is “data science”. But what is data science, anyway? We consider some perspectives, particularly the algorithmic perspective we will emphasize in this course.

## What is data science?

Although the field of data science is rapidly gaining in popularity, its definition is tenuous, at best. As one of the statistics faculty noted when talking to us about possible ways to design a data science curriculum, “if you ask a dozen statisticians to define data science, you’ll get at least a half-dozen different answers”. In this course, we take an algorithmic approach to data science. Let’s consider what we mean by that.

Data science, like statistics, is a way of exploring sets of information. Data science distinguishes itself from statistics by focusing more on providing a wide variety of mechanisms for gaining potential insights from existing data sets. In addition, to a computer scientist, data science is an opportunity to think about a progression of ways to work with data. For example, here is an “algorithmic” data science pipeline: Starting with a data set that is typically in a somewhat unstructured, less-than-usable form, one wrangles the data into a usable form, cleans the data to remove less applicable data points (e.g., incomplete entries), filters the data to extract the data points of interest, processes the data to put it in a common form, merges the data with other data sets, and finally analyzes or visualizes the data which may lead to insight. Admittedly, this approach relegates much of the interesting statistics and mathematics to “analyzes”. However, for the purposes of an this course, it allows you to focus on concepts from computer science in the context of data science.

Importantly, one does all these steps programmatically, so that it is possible to replicate the steps on a new or modified data set. It is the replicability that helps distinguish data science from other more ad hoc techniques for exploring data. When a data scientist removes data from their data sets, you know it because the instruction to do so is in the program.

## A narrative example

It may help to consider those steps in context. Let us consider a situation in which a student, Bari, is interested in exploring how much people spend on coffee. Bari may be doing so because they drink coffee and want to think more about their spending habits, because they are considering opening a coffee service, because they are lobbying the institution’s financial aid office to change its claimed “expected living costs”, or just they need to come up with some data set of the class.

After a Web search, Bari finds a report on common coffee purchases at a local Stellaclams and a ‘blog in which someone describes their daily drinking habits (including prices). They also convince a classmate who works at The Joe (a local coffee shop) to surreptitiously write down purchases for a week. (Of course, they first have this study approved by the College’s Institutional Review Board, which considers all studies involving human subjects.)

While Bari can download the Stellaclams and ‘blog pages, they cannot use those pages in the current form. Hence, they must extract the data from those pages. We term that task wrangling the data. While wrangling is important, it is not a core focus of the course. You will generally work with data that has already been wrangled into a more useful form.

While examining the data, Bari discovers that some of the prices make no sense—no one spends more than $10 for a cup of coffee and it seems unlikely that coffee has a negative price. After ensuring that the wrangling did not introduce spurious information, Bari must therefore clean the data to get rid of the non-sensical data. In our class, you will sometimes clean data that is missing fields, such as a location that has a name, but not a latitude or longitude. Bari may also have more data than they can (or want to) use. For example, they may want to focus on the past month’s data from the ‘blog or Stellaclams. Or they may want to look only at the basic “cup of joe”, rather than on other less-pure genres of coffee drink. We call the process of extracting the entries of interest filtering. Note that we distinguish cleaning the data from filtering the data to clarify that there is a difference between removing data that can’t be used and removing data that we choose not to use. However, you may find that you use similar processes, such as the filter procedure, for both activities. In further exploring the data, Bari realizes that the three sets provide different units. Stellaclams reports in terms of dollars and cents (as in$3.10). For some reason, the author of the ‘blog has decided to record prices in pieces of eight. (Here’s an example from the blog: “I went to Stellaclams today. They raised their prices. I can’t believe that I had to spend 25 pieces of eight on a plain old cup of joe!”). Because they wanted to surreptitiously record the data, Bari’s friend rounded all prices to the nearest whole dollar amount. After consulting with their professor, Bari decides that for the sake of comparison, all three data sets should use whole-dollar prices. Bari then writes a program that processes or transforms the data into a common form and merges the three data sets together.

Bari can then visualize the data or compute summary values, such as the average cost or the variability in prices.

As you might expect, throughout the semester we will explore ways to wrangle, clean, filter, process, merge, analyze, and even visualize data. Along the way, we will start to build our own tools to make it easier for us to do all of these processes.