September 19, 2012
When people ask me what it means to be a data scientist, I used to answer, "it means you don't have to hold my hand." By which I meant that as a data scientist (a consulting data scientist), I can handle the data collection, the data cleaning and wrangling, the analysis, and the final presentation of results (both technical and for the business audience) with a minimal amount of assistance from my clients or their people. Not no assistance, of course, but little enough that I'm not interfering too much with their day-to-day job. Read more