M.Sc Data Science at DAIICT Gandhinagar Offline Course

Data science is a “concept to unify statistics, data analysis, machine learning and their related methods” in order to “understand and analyze actual phenomena” with data. In other words, the detailed study of the flow of information from structured and unstructured data available with an organization is called data science. It primarily involves obtaining the meaningful insights from the data which is processed through analytical study. The current era is becoming a digital space where each organization deals with large amount of structured and unstructured data on a daily basis. Evolving technologies are leading to cost saving solutions for storage and analysis of such large data. In the current era, for the career progression, one needs to understand the language of data through analytical skill. Hence, it is absolutely necessary nowadays, to develop manpower with a skill to perform data analysis to get meaningful information from the data of different domains such as banking and finance, insurance, agriculture, healthcare, retail, education, social media, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment and so on. As reported recently, with nearly 100,000 vacancies, India is the second biggest data analytics jobs hub after the US and demand for data science skill sets is increasing at a very fast pace.

The field of data science has witnessed an immense growth in recent years particularly due to the rise of internet and social media. The exploration of data science by the business world initially started with analysis of business data and hence emphasis was given for financial data analytics. With the increase of multimedia data such as image, video, audio and text, each domain as mentioned above, many a times needs to perform analysis of such multimedia big data. Hence the study of data science includes analysis of multimedia data along with other types of data such as business data and unstructured social media data. In our daily life, now we are capturing data from sources such as i) sensors used in various places like agricultural fields, shopping malls, ii) posts on social media, iii) digital images and videos captured in cell phones and iv) purchase transactions made through e-commerce.  Analysis of such big data which could be multimodal in nature is a huge challenge. Modern technologies in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are now extensively used to get insights of such big data.

With the availability of modern technologies of data storage, cleaning and computing, the study of data science expanded beyond the boundaries of mathematics and statistics. In modern days the study of data science is constituted with the knowledge of mathematics, statistics and computer science. Data science brings together a lot of skills of these disciplines with adequate domain knowledge to help any organization find ways to i) take major business decisions, ii) reduce costs, iii) get in to new markets, iv) launch a new product or service, v) find the sentiment of the customers, vi) recruiting the best talent and so on.