Course Introduction

Biostat 203B

Statistics and data science

• Statistics, the science of data analysis, is the applied mathematics in the 21st century.

• Data is increasing in volume, velocity, and variety.

• My favorite definition of a data scientist:

A data scientist is someone who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.

Big data in 1990s

Huber (1994); (1996)

Data Size	Bytes	Storage Mode
tiny	\(10^2\)	piece of paper
small	\(10^4\)	a few pieces of paper
medium	\(10^6\) (MB)	a floppy disk
large	\(10^8\)	hard disk
huge	\(10^9\) (GB)	hard disk(s)
massive	\(10^{12}\) (TB)	hard disk(s); RAID storage

Big data in 21st centry

Four V’s of big data:

Source: IBM.

A typical data scientist on Linkedin

Course desciption

• This course introduces some computing skills and software tools for handling potentially big public health data.

• Read syllabus and schedule for a tentative list of topics and course logistics.

References

Huber, P. J. (1994). Huge data sets. In COMPSTAT 1994 (Vienna) (pp. 3–13). Heidelberg: Physica.

Huber, P. J. (1996). Massive data sets workshop: The morning after. In Massive data sets: Proceedings of a workshop (pp. 169–184). Washington: National Academy Press.