Question for Data Scientists

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I have been following the Data Science path and I really enjoy it. I have a question about it though. For a Data Scientist that does this for a living, is it more about understanding the statistics or is it about programming? The impression I have so far is that a minimal amount of python knowledge is needed. Just enough to get by. The rest are different ways to analyze data. It doesn’t even seem that complicated. There are modules for everything you need and you just need to plug in the numbers. It seems like you could just make a template for whichever statistic you need and then just plug in the numbers.

I’m not complaining about it or anything. I’m just wondering if maybe I should pick up a few statistics books to help me understand it better.

FYI, I also started on the Computer Science path too so I can learn more Python. They really compliment each other. Just an inside joke kind of conspiracy theory… I thought it was funny that I noticed some of the things I learned in the Computer Science section appeared in the Data Science section around the same time I made that decision to start it. I kept thinking… I wonder if there was some Data Scientist who looked at the data and knew when people like myself would switch over to the different course.

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I feel like as a programmer I would probably spend the day staring at a white board trying to figure out which function leads to which. As a data scientist I’d probably go through charts making sure I used the correct statistic and got the right histogram results.

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Probably a bit over simplified but i think you are correct. I do feel the same way at least.

In my experience figuring out machine learning i found that a lot of my time was spend checking data. Creating the models/coding the models was only about 20%-30% of the work.