There seems to be an attempt to rebrand the field of analytics and data analysis as AI or “data science”. I see too many social groups putting together “analytics and deep learning”, while obviously the two are barely related.

In my (probably unpopular) opinion, if there’s no degree of predictive modelling in your work, it’s not data science. If it doesn’t require you to implement some ML architecture from a paper, or at least fit/predict an existing one, it’s not data science. If there is no optimization problem, it could be an interesting data-related problem, it could be incredibly elegant and helpful to describe statistically, but what science is there exactly?

Why do I care? Because it does no good to the “AI hype”. There are researchers who spend years in accademia, and self-taught deep learning experts who mastered half a dozen subjects to even begin to understand how to model real world problems with data. Of course data analysis is necessary and helpful to many businesses, but it’s a different profession that requires different skills. And it’s not the same as data science.

What do you think?