Introduction to Data Science

Data science is a new interdisciplinary field that has attracted a lot of interest from the media in recent years, where it has been presented as a novelty. The first aim of this chapter is to describe the main factors behind this novelty: the datafication process and the democratization of analytical techniques. In the first case, we show that rendering different aspects of our lives into data, as individuals or as members of organizations, has produced rich descriptions of the world that open the door to the development of predictive models. In the second case, we stress the impact of “open source” culture on the analytical software community. As a result of this impact, analytical techniques are now mostly developed within an open domain, enabling their widespread use and the fast dissemination of results. This book has been designed as a small contribution to this democratization process by showing that anyone interested in this topic can become a junior data scientist in a few weeks.