#100DaysOfCode - Week10

For my tenth week of the #100DaysOfCode Challenge, it was all data science: visualization, analytics, and some statistics.

What Is Data Science?

Data science is sometimes described as a crossover discipline between programming, statistics, and some industry expertise. As a result, there are many points of entry into the field. But it's probably safe to say that if you're the person on the team that everyone comes to asking for tables, charts, diagrams, and analysis to help explain where things are coming from or where they're headed, you're probably a good candidate to explore data science further. And although you may be a strong Excel user, there are times when Excel is not the best choice.

What Tools Are Used For Data Science?

Data science may make use of a number of different tools and programming languages. Languages such as R and Scala are well known. However, Python, the language that I've been using for my 100DaysOfCode, is extremely popular and increasing in popularity for data science due to the large number of machine learning libraries that have been developed for the language, such as Keras, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. Other Python libraries for the discipline include scientific ones like Numpy, Matplotlib, and Pandas. And then distributions, frameworks, and tools like Anaconda, Jupyter Notebooks, and IPython top it off so that Python ends up offering a powerful ecosystem for data science.

Practice

There are seemingly endless sources of data available on the web, partly due to many governmental entities offering "open data" for public scrutiny and analysis. But many news outlets, social media platforms, and content publishers also offer their APIs for developer use. Using APIs, you can query and update analysis in real-time.

Interestingly, for many finance and accounting professionals, data analytics may be a friendly path into coding. You already may be closer than you think. Anyone who has written nested if statements, sumifs, or vlookups in a spreadsheet has been coding already, whether they know it or not. If that's you, maybe it's time to make the jump.

I'm here to help!

Rob Valdez, CPA, CISA, CISM, is a risk advisory services manager in Kaufman Rossin’s Boca Raton, Florida, office and provides technology consulting services, including PhishNet by Kaufman Rossin, a security awareness training service. Rob can be reached at rvaldez@kaufmanrossin.com.