Exploration Is a Valid Use of Your Time

Data science is about much more than jupyter notebooks, because data science problems are about more than machine learning.

What data should I collect? How good does my model need to be to be “good enough” to solve my problem? What form should my project take for it to be useful? Should it be a dashboard, a live app, or something else entirely? How do I deploy it? How do I make sure something awful and unexpected doesn’t happen when it’s deployed in production?

None of these questions can be answered by importing sklearn and pandas and hacking away in a jupyter notebook. Data science problems take a unique combination of business savvy and software engineering know-how, and that’s why Emmanuel Ameisen wrote a book called Building Machine Learning Powered Applications: Going from Idea to Product. Emmanuel is a machine learning engineer at Stripe, and formerly worked as Head of AI at Insight Data Science, where he oversaw the development of dozens of machine learning products.

Our conversation was focused on the missing links in most online data science education: business instinct, data exploration, model evaluation and deployment.