Data Science: The End of Statistics? (Posted on the Normal Deviate Blog)
As I see newspapers and blogs filled with talk of “Data Science” and “Big Data” I find myself filled with a mixture of optimism and dread. Optimism, because it means statistics is finally a sexy field. Dread, because statistics is being left on the sidelines.
The very fact that people can talk about data science without even realizing there is a field already devoted to the analysis of data — a field called statistics — is alarming. I like what Karl Broman says:
When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math.
If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics.
Well put.
Read the full article here