A Data Scientist requires expertise in several backgrounds:

• Machine Learning
• Statistics
• Programming (Python or R)
• Mathematics
• Databases

A Data Scientist must find patterns within the data. Before he/she can find the patterns, he/she must organize the data in a standard format.

Here is how a Data Scientist works:

1. Ask the right questions - To understand the business problem.
2. Explore and collect data - From database, web logs, customer feedback, etc.
3. Extract the data - Transform the data to a standardized format.
4. Clean the data - Remove erroneous values from the data.
5. Find and replace missing values - Check for missing values and replace them with a suitable value (e.g. an average value)

Data is a collection of information.

One purpose of Data Science is to structure data, making it interpretable and easy to work with.

Data can be categorized into two groups:

• Structured data
• Unstructured data

Unstructured data is not organized. We must organize the data for analysis purposes.

Structured data is organized and easier to work with.