How and why to hire a data scientist
Or, as we would say, a statistician.
When you have too much data for Excel to handle: data scientists know how to deal with large data sets.
When your data visualization skills are being stretched: as we will see, data scientists are skilled (or should be) at data visualization and should be able to figure out a way to visualize most quantitative things that you can describe with words.
When you aren’t sure if something is noise or information: this is a big one, and we will come back to it.
Read the rest at Mathbabe
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »