Data Science Learning Path

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 Table of Contents
Self-Taught Data Scientist Career Path for Beginners ........................................................ 3
What is Data Science? ................................................................................................................. 3
What is the buzz around Data Science Careers? ...................................................................... 4
Requirements of a Data Science Career .................................................................................... 4
What does a Career in Data Science Look like? ....................................................................... 4
Data Scientist Career: Job Growth in Future ............................................................................ 5
Learning Data Science Roadmap ............................................................................................... 5
The Learning Path to a Data Scientist Job ................................................................................ 6
FAQs .................................................................................................................................................. 7
How to start a career in data science with no experience? ..................................................... 7
Why choose data science as a career?...................................................................................... 8
What to learn to advance a career in data science? ................................................................. 8
How to switch careers to data science? .................................................................................... 8
How to get a data science job? ................................................................................................... 8

Data science has emerged as an exciting career path for students pursuing STEM. But,
many are still not sure about the perfect roadmap to excel in this new domain. This data

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scientist career learning path is for beginners to smoothly kick start their journey in the
fantastic field of data science.

Data Science is a blend of advanced mathematics, probability, statistics, and computer

programming. That is why many students who have a background in physics, chemistry,
engineering, or any other STEM disciplines aim for data science careers. Even in 2021,
data science maintained its previous position at number two on Glassdoor's list of top 50
jobs in the United States of America. Data science had been ruling that list since 2016.
These stats suggest that the buzz around data science is here to stay, at least for the next
few years. So, if you have been wondering whether making that choice of pursuing a career
in data science will be worth it or not, we hope you have got your answer. It is high time
you start learning the skills required to pursue the exciting career of data science, and if you
don’t know where to start, don’t worry. Follow the steps below to lay out a path to
becoming a data scientist.

Self-Taught Data Scientist Career Path for

Beginners

Any fresher can easily break into data science with the right skills in their hands. And for
the right skills, one needs to have an excellent data science career guide for reference.
Therefore, we have prepared a comprehensive list of resources for becoming a self-taught
data scientist. But, before we start with it, we’d like to give you a fair introduction to the
fantastic domain of data science.

What is Data Science?

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Data Science is an emerging field in STEM that involves leveraging data to solve
complicated business problems. The solution is devised by applying statistical algorithms
called machine learning models, which assist in revealing hidden patterns in the data. For
example, many businesses use data science tools on their customers’ data to understand
their preferences better.

What is the buzz around Data Science Careers?

Data, data, data! Why the hype? There are plenty of reasons, but the one that tops them all
is that if one uses the correct tools over the given data, they can draw hidden insights.
These insights are so impactful that they can transform the overall revenue. For instance,
you can consider the case of Southwest airlines that saved $100 million by cutting down
their planes’ idle time after using data science tools.

Requirements of a Data Science Career

If one aims for a career in data science, they should have a clear idea of the right skills
needed to become a data scientist. Below we have mentioned the qualities that a data
science aspirant must possess to become a successful data scientist.

 Excellent programming skills in one of the following languages: R or Python.

 Strong understanding of advanced mathematical concepts like linear algebra,
probability, statistics, differential equations, and calculus.
 Extensive knowledge of data visualization techniques.
 Ability to communicate well both orally and in writing.
 Expertise in conveying scientific results in an easily understandable manner.
 Strong problem-solving aptitude.
 Capability to leverage data to produce business solutions.
 Well-versed with applications of various machine learning and deep learning
algorithms.
 Experience in specialized domains such as Natural Language Processing/Computer
Vision/ etc. is a bonus.

What does a Career in Data Science Look like?

We now present what a data scientist does in their everyday life, that is, the day-to-day
responsibilities of a data scientist.

 Use data science tools to frame business problems and their solutions.
 Interact with the data engineering team to convey the requirements of a dataset.
 Present business solutions to various stakeholders of the company.
 Use various machine learning and deep learning techniques to curate predictive
models for different parameters.
 Engage with various teams to effectively contribute towards the overall business
objectives.

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  Use data visualization tools and analytics methods to perform Exploratory Data
Analysis.
 Implement various machine learning and deep learning algorithms in a programming
language like Python, R, etc.

Data Scientist Career: Job Growth in Future

As per LinkedIn, jobs in data science have displayed a 650% growth since 2012. A career in
data science is now quite often compared to a web developer and a software engineer.
Furthermore, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that data science jobs will likely
increase in the coming years. About 11.5 million data scientists are expected to get hired by
2026. All these numbers support the buzz around the data science field and are making it
pretty evident that making a career in data science will be rewarding even if someone starts
learning it right now.

Learning Data Science Roadmap

Now comes the question of how to learn data science on your own? It will be easy and fun
to follow the learning data science path below.

1. Mathematics is Key!
In Data Science, mathematics is the foundation of the most advanced tools and algorithms.
So, getting a hold of all the basic mathematical topics is essential for beginners. These
topics include linear algebra, matrix decompositions, calculus, and differential equations.
Most of these are pretty basic and are covered by high school textbooks. For those who
want to have a quick revision, you may refer to this free book, Mathematics for Machine
Learning, by Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal, Cheng Soon Ong. The first half covers
everything in decent depth, while the second half will motivate you to dive into machine
learning algorithms.

2. Code those Mathematical Equations!

When you get to implement those algorithms, mathematics becomes more fun. And that is
because the researchers have already prepared some fantastic and easy-to-use functions
and libraries for quick implementation. All one thus needs is to learn the syntax of the
programming language to get started. Considering Python is one of the most popular
languages in the data science community, we recommend you start with it and get a good
grasp of the language with the help of this book, Learning with Python – Green Tea Press. It
introduces variables, expressions, statements, loops, functions, and everything beginner-
friendly.

3. Dive into Algorithms!

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After you have learned the coding skills, the next task is to learn algorithms in data science.
First, one should start with supervised machine learning algorithms as they are easy to
learn. After that, they should explore the unsupervised machine learning and reinforcement
learning methods. Next, they must focus on understanding various deep learning
algorithms. While learning about different algorithms, it is essential to understand which
parameters can be altered to generate customized models as It helps in understanding their
implementation better. The book for the algorithms in data science is Machine Learning For
Absolute Beginners: A Plain English Introduction by Olver Theobald and Deep Learning by
Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville.

4. Master of all Trades!

Jack of all trades, master of none! While many people follow this quote, data scientists don’t
exactly get to pick their bias. They are expected to be well-versed with exciting subdomains
of data science like Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc. It is so because
they are likely to work with a team of NLP researchers, computer vision engineers, etc. For
that reason, we suggest you collaborate with professionals and understand the broad
applications of data science tools.

5. Practice, Practice, and Practice!

We all know practice makes perfect. The more you practice on different projects, the more
polished your skills are. And just like that, developing data science skills also need practice.
So, diversify your skill set by working on challenging data science problems. Read the
following section if you want to know precisely how you can do that.

The Learning Path to a Data Scientist Job

Landing a data science job is difficult if you lack industry-relevant experience. And that is
why we suggest you work on the projects mentioned below to strengthen your skills and
increase your chances of getting a data scientist job. Here are a few easy projects that you
can start with to hone relevant skills quickly.

 Avocado Machine Learning Project Python for Price Prediction: This project will give
you the perfect kickstart to understand how machine learning algorithms are used to
solve business problems. You will learn how data is cleaned and analyzed using
statistical tools to make it ready for applications of different algorithms in Python.
 Machine Learning Projects-BigMart Sales Prediction Solution Python: Well, data
science tools are not only used for estimating prices, but can also be used to predict
sales of a company. This project will guide you to leverage data to develop exciting
business strategies. Through this project, you will understand regressor models,
hybrid modeling, and advanced data analysis methods.
 Customer-based predictive analytics to find the next best offer: Here is another
project example to help you understand how business growth can be improved using
predictive analytics and data science. This project will help you analyze customer

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 behavior to design the best-customized offers. You will learn about data visualization
tools and machine learning algorithms like random forests, etc. Additionally, you will
explore data science topics such as cross-validation, RMSE, etc.
 MNIST Dataset: Digit Recognizer Data Science Project: This is one of the most
simple projects to understand the application of deep learning algorithms in data
science. This project aims to build a system to identify handwritten digits if presented
with their images. You will use various Exploratory Data Analysis techniques and
algorithms like XGBoost, K-nearest neighbors, deep neural networks, etc.
 Ecommerce product reviews - Pairwise ranking and sentiment analysis: For most
businesses, understanding customers’ sentiments is critical as it helps them improve
their business model. In this project, you will use NLP methods like the TF-IDF
model with the random forest machine learning model to develop a system that can
analyze words of customers’ feedback and identify their sentiments. You will learn
about various Text Preprocessing models that perform Language Detection,
Gibberish Detection, Profanity Detection, and Spelling Correction.
 OpenCV Project for Beginners to Learn Computer Vision Basics OpenCV is
a Python library that data scientists widely use to implement their computer vision
projects. This is the perfect project to give a beginner the essential headstart to
Computer vision. Work on this project to learn how to use OpenCV for reading,
writing, and displaying images. Additionally, you will learn about Image thresholding,
Image Smoothing, Morphological transformation, etc., using the OpenCV library.

The list does not and should not end here. Keeping point 5 of the data science roadmap in
mind, you should explore more projects to broaden your data science skills. Check out
the ProjectPro repository of solved end-to-end data science projects to access solved
solutions for such enterprise-grade projects. Our subscription comes with a free Python
course for beginners, so you don’t need to worry about learning a programming language at
all.

FAQs

How to start a career in data science with no

experience?

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The first step towards starting a career in data science is honing the relevant skills. And for
that, you should start with learning advanced mathematics (linear algebra, differential
equations, probability and statistics, and calculus). Next, move on to understanding a
popular data science programming language like Python,R, etc. After that, invest time in
understanding different machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Finally, polish all
these skills by working on multiple data science projects.

Why choose data science as a career?

Data Science has been labelled as the sexiest career of the twenty-first century, and it
ranks second on Glassdoor’s list of top 50 careers in the US. The primary reason behind its
popularity is that it encourages people from diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in the
field.

What to learn to advance a career in data science?

If you are a newbie who has landed a junior data scientist role, we recommend you start
working on diverse business problems. Additionally, make sure to explore different
subdomains in Data Science like NLP, Computer vision, etc. and develop a diverse skill set.

How to switch careers to data science?

The first step towards switching to a career in data science will be understanding the skillset
required to pursue the field. And the next step will be to polish those skills by working on
different data science projects. Once you do that, create a data science portfolio that
highlights all the projects you worked on.

How to get a data science job?

Equip yourself with data scientists’ right tools and techniques every day. Next, prepare a
data science portfolio and become a freelance data scientist. As you gradually build a data
science portfolio, apply on job posting websites like LinkedIn, Indeed, etc., to land a data
science job.

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