Who are the most active Big Data, Data Science Influencers and Leaders on LinkedIn? We analyze the data and bring you the list of key people to follow.

By Prasad Pore, KDnuggets.

There are a number of lists that examine who is influential on LinkedIn, or who is active in Big Data / Data Science space, but we have not seen a list which combines both criteria. KDnuggets earlier post Meet the 11 Big Data & Data Science Leaders on LinkedIn looked at people with large number of followers on LinkedIn, but some of them, like Hilary Mason, have not published since 2013, while others have written mainly on topics unrelated to Big Data and Data Science. This post presents 16 leaders in Big Data and Data Science who have published a post in the last 3 months and who have at least 3 relevant posts this year. The number of followers are as of Sep 23, 2016.

1. Bernard Marr (801K followers) is a best-selling business author, keynote speaker and consultant in big data, analytics and enterprise performance. He is a frequent contributor to the World Economic Forum, writes for Forbes, is recognized by the CEO Journal as one of today's leading business brains and by LinkedIn as one of the World's top 5 business influencers.

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2. Josh Bersin (427K followers) is founder and Principal at Bersin by Deloitte. Bersin by Deloitte is the leading provider of research-based information, benchmarking, professional development, and advisory consulting services for strategic HR, talent management, leadership development, recruiting, and training organizations.

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3. DJ Patil (306K followers) is U.S. Chief Data Scientist at White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Writer of one of the most cited articles in business on how to think about the emerging area of data science - "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century".

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4. Dennis R. Mortensen (136K followers) is CEO and founder of x.ai, Visual Revenue, evonax and Canvas Interactive. He is author of Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights.

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5. Tom Davenport (88K followers) is a world-renowned thought leader and author, president's distinguished professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a Fellow of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and an independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He is an author and co-author of 15 books and more than 100 articles and also helps organizations to revitalize their management practices in areas such as analytics, information and knowledge management, process management, and enterprise systems.

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6. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (59K followers), President of KDnuggets, is a well-known expert in Business Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science. KDnuggets was voted the Best Twitter on Big Data. Gregory co-founded KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data mining conferences) and SIGKDD, professional organization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

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7. Carla Gentry (50K followers) is a freelance Data Scientist, expert in Comprehensive Customer Satisfaction and Retention Analysis, Brand Research and Competitive Analysis, Employee Retention Research, Database creation and mining, Survey Creation and Analysis (New Product and Branding). She has overall 19 years of industry experience.

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8. Vincent Granville (20K followers) is a founder of Analytic Bridge and Data Science Central. Vincent is a former post-doctorate of Cambridge University and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.

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9. Kirk Borne (9,500 followers) is a Big Data and Data Science advisor, Consultant, Blogger, Data Scientist, Astrophysicist, Space Scientist and public speaker. 2016: #1 Big Data, #2 Machine Learning, #13 IOT influencer worldwide; 2015: #2 Big Data, Data Mining, Data Science influencer.

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10. Bob Gourley (7,300 followers) is partner and co-founder of Cognitio Corp., author and publisher of the Daily Threat Brief, winner of InfoWorld top 25 CTO of the year for 2007, named to Washingtonian Magazine "DC Tech Titan" list in 2009, served as the CTO for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has bachelor of science degree in chemistry, masters degree in national security affairs and military science, and computer science.

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11. Paul Zikopoulos (6,800 followers) is an award winning international speaker, author (19 published books including Hadoop for Dummies, Big Data Beyond the Hype, among others), 350+ published magazine articles, Recognized Big Data Expert with strong social presence and influencer status. He is Vice President for Offering Management in IBM Platform Analytics division, with focus on competitive Big Data technologies and skills eminence.

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12. Michael Wu PhD (6,300 followers) is chief scientist at Lithium Technologies. He developed Facebook Engagement Index (FEI) w/ metrics and a framework for designing and creating new and effective gamification strategies, mechanics and dynamics.

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13. Harish Kotadia (4,800 followers) is industry recognized thought leader on Big Data and Analytics with more than 13 years' of work experience in CRM/Analytics, BI program and project management for Fortune 500 clients in the US. He has five years' of work experience as a Research Executive in Marketing Research, Analytics and Consulting industry with leading MR organizations such as Gallup.

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14. James Kobielus (4,600 followers) is IBM's Big Data Evangelist. He is an industry veteran who spearheads IBM's thought leadership activities in big data, data science, enterprise data warehousing, advanced analytics, Hadoop, business intelligence, data management, and next best action technologies.

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15. James Taylor (4,100 followers) is a leading expert in decision management and development of Decision Management Systems. He has work experience in business rules, predictive analytics and other decisioning technologies to improve operational systems. He is a strategy consultant, speaker, published author of Decision Management Systems (IBM Press), Smart (Enough) Systems (Prentice Hall).

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16. Mark van Rijmenam (3,900 followers) is an international speaker on Big Data, Blockchain, Trends, IoT and Disruptive Innovation. He is founder of Datafloq, cofounder of Data Donderdag and founding partner of The Digital Leadership Initiative.

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