Definition

data scientist

A data scientist is a job title for an employee or business intelligence (BI) consultant who excels at analyzing data, particularly large amounts of data, to help a business gain a competitive edge.

The title data scientist is sometimes disparaged because it lacks specificity and can be perceived as an aggrandized synonym for data analyst. Regardless, the position is gaining acceptance with large enterprises who are interested in deriving meaning from big data, the voluminous amount of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data that a large enterprise produces.

A data scientist possesses a combination of analytic, machine learning, data mining and statistical skills as well as experience with algorithms and coding. Perhaps the most important skill a data scientist possesses, however, is the ability to explain the significance of data in a way that can be easily understood by others.

See also: Director of First Impressions

Related glossary terms: big data analytics, e-score, positive correlation, correlation coefficient, data science, association rules (in data mining), negative correlation, descriptive modeling, polynomial interpolation, implicit data

Contributor(s): Nicole Laskowski

This was last updated in September 2011

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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