In short, data science is making sense of data. We, as a society, have become very good at collecting large amounts of data. The job of a data scientist is to find patterns in the data and to use the data to answer practical questions.

Data science is a multi-disciplinary field that com- bines skills from computer science, statistics, and mathematics. A data scientist interacts with data through a variety of programming languages, such as R and Python. A data scientist needs to be comfortable writing his/her own programs, as well as using existing programs, to obtain, clean, and analyze data. Statistics are used to summarize the data, make models, and predict undocumented behavior. A data scientist must be able to “think in higher dimensions”. This requires a mastery of linear algebra and multivariate calculus. More advanced techniques, such as machine learning, require additional mathematical skills, like optimization.

The PUC Mathematics Department offers a B.S. degree in Data Science. The Data Science major prepares students to be employed to work with and analyze data in a variety of industries including entertainment, healthcare, technology, and political and social science. The degree also provides a background for further graduate study in data science or related fields.

Register for DTSC 101 – Introduction to Data Science. Anyone can take it! In this hands-on course students will discover simple relationships in data and identify causality and model deterministic data.