Data Scientist Hat

Many professions have a traditional hat - a tall white hat for a chef, a 10-gallon hat for a cowboy, a mortarboard hat for a graduate, a hard hat for a miner.

In the 20th century analytics professionals could wear a data miner hat, adapted from a regular miner hat by addition of a large database (here is Gregory modeling a data miners hat for Huffpost). However, now analytics professionals prefer the title of a data scientist, proclaimed the 21st century sexiest profession.

What should data scientists wear?

For any kind of hat, there should also be a logo.

The combined brainstorming of Talent Analytics and KDnuggets have produced the first 3 designs for the logo - see below.

The first 3 graph designs have Confusion on the vertical axis, Data Size on the horizontal axis, and a Data Science curve showing which decreases in confusion as the data size increases.

Version 2 also has a red Hype curve (increasing confusion as the data size increases).
Version 3 has Intuition curve, and Insight at the point of intersection of Data Science and Intuition.
Version 4 is a simplified version of Drew Conway Data Science Venn Diagram.

Which of these design do you like best? Vote via twitter by replying to @kdnuggets with your selection corresponding to the design: #DataScienceHat1, #DataScienceHat2, etc

Do you have a better design for a data science logo ? Please email to .

If there is sufficient demand, we will produce actual physical data scientist hats, with white-hat and black-hat options, of course. There could be a snake-skin version for Python Data Science.

In addition, data science profession could have approriate one-liners, such as

• Size matters! My Data is Bigger than Yours
• Data Science is 80% data preparation, 20% complaining about data preparation (thanks to @BigDataBorat)
• Torture data long enough and it will confess to anything (Black hat data science?)
• Size is not important! It's how you use it that's important (thanks to Brendan Tierney)

What are your favorite data science one-liners?

Please email to .

Here are some additional hat suggestions received on LinkedIn group Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling:

• Vincent Granville: These hats are supposed to protect you or others from something:
  • Miner: hat protects head from rock falls, hitting a rock wall
  • Cowboy: hat protects head from bullets or from sun
  • Baker: hat protects cakes from being contaminated by hair
  • Data Scientist: hat protects brain from nefarious radiations and waves
• Gregory Piatetsky: Great idea ! We need a data scientist hat that will protect from Hype and Overfitting !
• Bill Galen: I would suggest a Sam Spade fedora, but that's already been taken.
  Panama is a close second--even for the ladies: www.pilotguides.com/images/content/tv_shows/crews/panama_columbia/panama_hat200x250.jpg
• Mauricio Pommier Gasser: I like this hat ^ ...
• Andrew Troemner: This reminds me when I was in grad school for Economics, and one of my old high school teachers swore he would buy me the most atrocious-looking bowtie.
  If neckwear is on the table, may I recommend and ascot? Not because it's particularly appropriate but just because I want to be classy while I'm pouring over Python scripts.