Sources Agree: Data Science Skills Go Beyond Data

As data science enthusiasts know, there’s a lot more to excelling in the field than just its technical aspects. Data professionals need a wide range of skills, extending well beyond the technical aspects of data manipulation and analysis.

This week’s episode of the Alter Everything podcast showcases Carlene Jones, data and analytics consultant, and Nynne Haagensen, a data enthusiast who worked with Carlene. Their conversation reinforces that people skills, communication abilities and business savvy are all critical to success in data science and analytics.

What are all those skills? To explore online conversations around this skill set, I decided to gather and analyze some data, naturally, inspired by this fantastic topic modeling trilogy (part 3 is coming soon!). This seemed like a fun opportunity to apply topic modeling with Alteryx Designer to what folks have discussed out there on the interwebz about the data science skill set. (Topic Modeling is part of the Alteryx Intelligence Suite, which includes some new text mining tools.)

I built a workflow in Designer that scraped 64 articles from the data science site KDnuggets tagged “skills” and cleaned up the text. I also used Text Pre-processing to quickly prep the remaining text before sending it into the Topic Modeling and Word Cloud tools. The word cloud below gives you a preview of some of the prominent ideas, but topic modeling lets us dig a little deeper.

I asked the Topic Modeling tool to identify three dominant topics in the text of these articles. You should definitely read all the details on how this process works, but in a nutshell: This is an unsupervised approach, meaning that I’m not specifying what I want the model to find in advance, but rather letting it identify on its own the key ideas in the text of the articles. This tool assumes that each chunk of text I feed it is a mixture of those three different topics, since I asked for three. It figures out how those topics are represented in each chunk based on the probability that certain words occur together.