Data Science: An Introduction

This chapter gives a general introduction to data science as a concept and to the topics covered in this book. First, we present a rough definition of data science, and point out how it relates to the areas of statistics, machine learning and big data technologies. Then, we review some of the most relevant tools that can be used in data science ranging from optimization to software. We also discuss the relevance of building models from data. The chapter ends with a detailed review of the structure of the book.