Getting into Data Science

03/01/19 • 22 min

What does it take to become a data scientist? We speak with three people who have become data scientists in the last three years and find out what it takes, in their opinions, to land a data science job and to be prepared for a career in the field.Curtis: We’ve talked a lot in our recent episodes about all the interesting things you can do with data science, and we’ve only talked a little bit recently about what it actually takes to get into the field, which is a topic that a lot of you have reached out to us and asked us to cover in a more thorough way. So today, we’re taking a broader approach on this topic by talking to three data scientists who have become data scientists in the last three years. You’re going to be able to hear all the details of each of their three journeys, how they got started, how they landed their jobs, and what their best advice is for getting into the field, and this will give you a broad view about how to get into data science from three people who have actually done it.Ginette: I’m Ginette.Curtis: And I’m Curtis.Ginette: And you are listening to Data Crunch.Curtis: A podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.Ginette: A Vault Analytics production.Ginette: Here at Data Crunch we’ve been hard at work developing a technology that allows executives and business leaders to gain insight from their data instantly—simply by talking to the air. We hook up your data to an Alexa device with custom skills built in to understand the questions you have about your business - and give you answers. Figure out sales forecasts, marketing performance, operational compliance, progress on KPIs, and more by just talking to Alexa. We are officially launching the product this week and have room for three initial customers—if you're interested, head over to datacrunchcorp.com/alexa or datacrunchpodcast.com/alexa (both work), and book some time to chat with us. We’ll assess if your company is a good fit, and if so, we look forward to working with you!Tyler Folkman: My name’s Tyler Folkman. I've gotten into data science in kind of a strange route to be honest. I did my undergrad in economics, actually originally thinking to get into computer science, but for some reason, I had this thought that computer science was going to get outsourced; I don't know if that was a thing, but I think people back in the early 2000s were talking about computer science getting outsourced, so I thought about business, which ended up begin economics, which I really liked, and then ended up doing economic consulting, which is, basically in usually large litigation cases, lawyers hire economists to value damages, so for example, when Samsung and Apple were suing each other, I worked on the Samsung side to help value how much they might sue Apple for, for patent infringement, and a lot of that involves statistical analyses, data analytics, econometrics as economists would call it. And I got really interested in just this idea of data being a really powerful tool for making decisions and coming to conclusions, and so I started hearing about machine learning on the Internet, kind of dabbling with Python, which at the time, I was a Windows user, and it was a huge pain to get Python installed, but I kind of got it up and running, played around with things like SciKit learn, read some blogs, and really got into machine learning and found that it was really housed more in the computer science department at that time, and just kind of decided to apply to some computer science departments and was lucky to get in at University of Texas at Austin and do some studies there, join a machine learning lab and got to do some work at Amazon. Really got a really good set of experiences to kind of help me learn how to be both a programmer and a machine learning person, a little bit of statistics, and jumped straight from there over here to Ancestry and was luc...

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Statistics Done Wrong—A Woeful Podcast Episode

Beginning: Statistics are misused and abused, sometimes even unintentionally, in both scientific and business settings. Alex Reinhart, author of the book "Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide" talks about the most common errors people make when trying to figure things out using statistics, and what happens as a result. He shares practical insights into how both scientists and business analysts can make sure their statistical tests have high enough power, how they can avoid “truth inflation,” and how to overcome multiple comparisons problems.Ginette: In 2009, neuroscientist Craig Bennett undertook a landmark experiment in a Dartmouth lab. A high tech fMRI machine was used on test subjects, who were “shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence” and asked “to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.” Would it be found that different parts of the brain were associated with different emotional associations? In fact, it was. The experiment was a success. The results came in showing brain activity changes for the different tasks, and the p-value came out to 0.001, indicating a significant result.The problem? The only participant was a 3.8 pound 18-inch mature Atlantic salmon, who was “not alive at the time of scanning.”Ginette: I’m Ginette.Curtis: And I’m Curtis.Ginette: And you are listening to Data Crunch.Curtis: A podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company.Ginette: This study was real. It was real data, robust analysis, and an actual dead fish. It even has an official sounding scientific study name—”Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon”.Craig Bennett did the experiment to show that statistics can be dangerous territory. They can be abused and misleading—whether or not the experimenter has nefarious intentions. Still, statistics are a legitimate and powerful tool to discover actual truths and find important insights, so they cannot be ignored. It becomes our task to wield them correctly, and to be careful when accepting or rejecting statistical assertions we come across.Today we talk to Alex Reinhart, author of the book “Statistics done wrong—The Woefully complete guide”. Alex is an expert on how to do statistics wrong. And incidentally, how to do them right.Alex: We end up using statistical methods in science and in business to answer questions, often very simple questions, of just “does this intervention or this treatment or this change that I made, does it have an effect?” Often in a difficult situation, because there are many things going on, you know, if you're doing a medical treatment there’s many different reasons that people recover in different times, and there's a lot of variation, and it’s hard to predict these things. If you’re doing an A-B test on a website, your visitors are all different. Some of them will want to buy your product or whatever it is, and some of them won’t, and so there’s a lot of variation that happens naturally, and we’re always in the position of having to ask, “This thing/change I made or invention I did, does it have an effect, and can I distinguish that effect from all the other things that are going on.” And this leads to a lot of problems, so statistical methods exist to help you answer that questions by seeing how much variation is there naturally, and this effect I saw, is it more than I would have expected had my intervention not worked or not done anything, but it doesn’t give you certainty. It gives us nice words, which is like “statistically significant,” which sounds important, but it doesn't give you certainty. You're often asking the question, “Is this effect that I’m seeing from my experim...