Data Science Salary and Insights for 2025

Data science is a transdisciplinary academic field that employs the use of statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or infer knowledge and insights from data that is sometimes noisy, structured or unstructured.

Data science mixes domain knowledge from the application domain, such as the natural sciences, information technology and medicine. Data science is also a science, a research paradigm, a research method, a discipline, a workflow, and profession. 

According to one definition, data science is ‘a concept to unite statistics, data analysis, informatics and their relevant methods’ that attempts ‘to grasp actual phenomena and analyze them with data’. It relies on methods and theories derived from many disciplines, but found within mathematics, statistics, computer science, information science and domain knowledge.However, data science is not merely computer science or information science. In 1998, Turing Award-winning computer scientist Jim Gray envisioned data science as a ‘fourth paradigm’ of science (empirical, theoretical, computational, and now data-driven) and asserted that ‘the impact of information technology is changing everything in science’ (notably, including the ever-increasing flood of data).

A data scientist essentially writes a program, which applies statistical algorithms to the data. It ‘learns’ from these data, and can be asked to make a determination about something similar but novel.