Data Science: The End of Statistics?

As I see newspapers and blogs filled with talk of “Data Science” and “Big Data” I find myself filled with a mixture of optimism and dread. Optimism, because it means statistics is finally a sexy field. Dread, because statistics is being left on the sidelines.

The very fact that people can talk about data science without even realizing there is a field already devoted to the analysis of data — a field called statistics — is alarming. I like what Karl Broman says:

When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math.

If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics.

Well put.

Maybe I am just pessimistic and am just imagining that statistics is getting left out. Perhaps, but I don’t think so. It’s my impression that the attention and resources are going mainly to Computer Science. Not that I have anything against CS of course, but it is a tragedy if Statistics gets left out of this data revolution.

Two questions come to mind:

1. Why do statisticians find themselves left out?

2. What can we do about it?

I’d like to hear your ideas. Here are some random thoughts on these questions. First, regarding question 1.

Here is a short parable: A scientist comes to a statistician with a question. The statistician responds by learning the scientific background behind the question. Eventually, after much thinking and investigation, the statistician produces a thoughtful answer. The answer is not just an answer but an answer with a standard error. And the standard error is often much larger than the scientist would like. The scientist goes to a computer scientist. A few days later the computer scientist comes back with spectacular graphs and fast software. Who would you go to? I am exaggerating of course. But there is some truth to this. We statisticians train our students to be slow and methodical and to question every assumption. These are good things but there is something to be said for speed and flashiness. Generally, speaking, statisticians have limited computational skills. I saw a talk a few weeks ago in the machine learning department where the speaker dealt with a dataset of size 10 billion. And each data point had dimension 10,000. It was very impressive. Few statisticians have the skills to do calculations like this.

On to question 2. What do we do about it?

Whining won’t help. We can complain that that “data scientists” are ignoring biases, not computing standard errors, not stating and checking assumption and so on. No one is listening.

First of all, we need to make sure our students are competitive. They need to be able to do serious computing, which means they need to understand data structures, distributed computing and multiple programming languages.

Second, we need to hire CS people to be on the faculty in statistics department. This won’t be easy: how do we create incentives for computer scientists to take jobs in statistics departments?

Third, statistics needs a separate division at NSF. Simply renaming DMS (Division of Mathematical Sciences) as has been debated, isn’t enough. We need our own pot of money. (I realize this isn’t going to happen.)

To summarize, I don’t really have any ideas. Does anyone?