The Magical World of Data Science

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C. Clarke

With the advent of technology and its incorporation in our life has led to generation of data in huge amount. Data is extracted from various resources such as Social Media, e-commerce sites, Mobile phones, Healthcare, internet searches, online surveys etc. This variety of data has lot of hidden insights which can produce magical results with the help of emerging field called ‘Data Science’.

Science has provided us an empirical field where discovering and describing the things are done by observing and experimenting. Data Science is a form of applied science which carefully studies large amount of data using various analytical techniques and then describing the results.

Earlier the Business houses were totally dependent on the intelligence and gut feeling of few bunch of people. Nowadays, this work has been taken up by intuitive tools and techniques which has provided a significant shift in policy making in various areas such as healthcare, travel, shopping, social and political issues etc.

Data Science performs magic using various tools resulting in analysis that converts annoying data storage into useful insights.

 A very interesting example of data science we use in daily life is Google maps. Many people are using Google maps but not knowing how they work, it is we or the people using it provide all the information regarding traffic and routes. Whenever a car drives through a route and a person sitting in the car has a cell phone with Google maps installed and connected to internet, then the data such as speed of car, route etc. is send to the Google maps server which is analyzed resulting in the real time traffic reports to other users.

Various tools that can be used to show magical results with Data sets:

S.No.	Name of the Tool
1	Rapid Miner Not just a GUI, it also extends support to people using Python & R for model building. Their product line has several products built for big data, visualizations, model deployment, some of which (enterprise) include a subscription fee.
2	Rattle GUI This GUI is built on R Programming Language and is a free software. It’s also more than just data mining tool. Rattle supports various ML algorithms such as Tree, SVM, Boosting, Neural Net, Survival, Linear models etc.
3	Orange It is an open-source data visualization, machine learning and data mining toolkit. It has an extensive library of data mining tasks which includes all classification, regression, clustering methods.
4	Weka It is free software and provides options for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules and visualization.

Puja Munjal

Assistant Professor 

Dept. of Information Technology