Data Science

Data science is the practice of turning raw data into useful answers and decisions. It blends statistics, computer programming, and knowledge of the problem area to find patterns, make predictions, and explain what is going on.

In practice a data scientist might predict which customers will cancel a subscription, estimate how a price change affects sales, or build a dashboard that shows a hospital its bed usage in real time. It matters because almost every organisation now records far more data than a person could read by hand, and someone has to translate that flood of numbers into something a human can act on. A common misconception is that data science is mostly fancy machine learning; in reality most of the work is asking the right question and cleaning messy data.