This is not intended to be mapped to a set of college courses. It is intended to be a listing of necessary skills for a data scientist. For a definition of data scientist, see this previous post.

Mathematics

  • Calculus – not directly important to data science, but the knowledge is important to understand the statistics and machine learning
  • Matrix Operations

Statistics

  • Regression – Linear and Logistic
  • Bayesian Statistics

Tools

  • Hadoop
  • R – stats
  • Octave – machine learning

Computing

  • Basic Programming – Java, C/C++, and Python seem to be good language choices
  • Machine Learning
  • Database Knowledge – not limited to just relational databases

Communication

  • Data Visualization – how to make data look good: maps, graphs, etc
  • Presentation – story telling, be comfortable explaining data to others
  • Writing

Do you have anything to add/remove from the list?