Data Domain Expertise

If you don t know me any of the speculations could be the right answer.

Data domain expertise. The domain expert s greatest strength is the ability to identify which questions need to be answered and the data scientists role is to maneuver and leverage advanced data technologies to build expert systems to answer those questions. A data scientist who has domain expertise sufficient to understanding and acting successfully on a given business objective and who can talk the domain expert s language stands a much greater chance of developing a tool which will work properly and be more readily adopted within the organization. A domain expert has usually become an expert both by education and experience in that domain.

Both imply a significant amount of time spent in the domain. We often settle for only descriptive analytics. Some of the tasks in advanced analytics design that a domain expert is best suited to perform are things like creating organization specific dictionaries defining classification categories creating an effective training set for the learning algorithms helping understand the desired business outcomes at a more granular level amongst others.

As a simple illustration have a look at these groups of words for different industries. These experts allow spieker point to dive directly into the complexities of understanding what the data is showing. This chart is also a good representation of a common issue in business intelligence.

As data scientists you may be working in a wide variety of industries each of which has its own intricacies that can only be learned gradually over time. Domain expertise is the knowledge and understanding of a particular field. You need domain expertise.

In this case the domain expert will understand their end customers and be able to describe the emerging data patterns to the analytics team. The data analysis now becomes much more effective and pointed. If we have domain expertise we may need to review data and ask questions to get better insights and then rely on our knowledge and experiences to complete the picture.

This is where domain expertise is even more critical to validate whether the data at hand can be transformed into something that will actually support the desired analyses. Domain experts and data scientists.