The previous KDnuggets Poll asked How different is "Data Science" from "Statistics" ?
While there was a wide range of opinions, the vote average was between "Mostly" and "Partly" different.
| How different is "Data Science" from "Statistics" ? | |
|---|---|
| Fundamentally - the main issues are different (47) |  13.8% |
| Mostly - majority of main issues are different (77) | 22.6% |
| Partly - most main issues are similar (127) | 37.4% |
| Only in the name, the main issues are similar (65) | 19.1% |
| Not sure (24) | 7.1% |
Using the 0-100 scale, we can assign the "Fundamentally" vote the value of 100, "Mostly" - 66, "Not sure" as 50, "Partly" - 33, and "Only in the name" - 10. We then get the overall average value of 46 - between "Mostly" and "Partly" different.
The following table shows opinion breakdown by region, with bar height representing the number of voters from that region, and bar width - how different they perceived "Data Science" and "Statistics".
We note that Latin American, African and European data miners believe that the difference between "data science" and "statistics" is significantly higher difference than US and AU/NZ data miners do.
| Region | Difference |
|---|---|
| Latin America |  60.3 |
| Africa/Middle East | 56.2 |
| Europe | 52.5 |
| Asia | 46.1 |
| US/Canada | 42.0 |
| Australia / New Zealand | 34.8 |
Comments
Tom S, What it has been called...
When I first joined the industry in Database Marketing. It was also called Management Science, and Data Modeling (for me was confusing, as I thought of data modeling and database design).