On any given day, a data scientist’s responsibilities may include:
- Solving business problems through undirected research and framing open-ended industry questions
- Extract huge volumes of structured and unstructured data. They query structured data from relational databases using programming languages such as SQL. They gather unstructured data through web scraping, APIs, and surveys.
- Employ sophisticated analytical methods, machine learning and statistical methods to prepare data for use in predictive and prescriptive modeling
- Thoroughly clean data to discard irrelevant information and prepare the data for preprocessing and modeling
- Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA) to determine how to handle missing data and to look for trends and/or opportunities
- Discovering new algorithms to solve problems and build programs to automate repetitive work
- Communicate predictions and findings to management and IT departments through effective data visualizations and reports
- Recommend cost-effective changes to existing procedures and strategies