Posts
 |
| Photo: The Market Mogul |
As a result, the three terms data science, machine learning, and deep learning have transitioned almost overnight from buzzwords to standard vocabulary, and have become synonymous with the direction that society is moving in. But how many can really enunciate the differences between those sacred terms?
Data Science
In the olden days, it was called statistics. But now it has morphed and grown, like Thanos’s chin, until it became ‘data science’. Today, top-flight universities offer degrees in it and everyone is calling it a career path that will never fail.
The first recorded reference to ‘data science’ was by Peter Nauer, a Danish computer pioneer, at the White Hart Tavern in 1960 when he used it to replace the term ‘computer science’. Actually, the White Hart Tavern part is not true, he was probably in his office talking to a grad student, but it still makes for a good story.
One of the more modern references to it was by C. F. Jeff Wu in his 1997 lecture at the University of Michigan “Statistics — Data Science?”. In Dr Wu’s universe, data science moved somewhat past traditional statistics, using the trio of data collection, modelling and analysis, and significantly, decision making.
Turing Award winner, Jim Gray, looked at it in 2007 as a ‘fourth paradigm of science’, augmenting the normal scientific methods by including the dimension of ‘data-driven analysis’. But it was not until 2012 when the Harvard Business Review published their article “Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” that things really began to take off...
Machine Learning
Wikipedia says it best:
“Machine Learning is a field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to learn . . . without being explicitly programmed.”
It is that last clause that is key; without being explicitly programmed...
Deep Learning
Read more...Deep Learning
Of all the words encountered in this article, none is more
forbidding, more laden with the unknown, more likely to send a
terrifying chill down the length of one’s back, than deep learning. Is this indeed what will unleash SkyNet on this unsuspecting world? There are some people who would swear it will. But it will not. Or at least not yet. Not for a few years.
Again, Wikipedia nails it by calling deep learning:
“part of a broader family of machine learning based on learning data representations as opposed to task-specific algorithms.”
Source: The Market Mogul
