Data science , also known as data-driven science , is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, [1] [2] similar to data mining . Data science is a "concept to unify statistics, data analysis, machine learning and their related methods" in order to "understand and analyze actual phenomena" with data. [3] It employs techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the broad areas of mathematics , statistics , information science , and computer science , in particular from the subdomains of machine learning , classification , cluster analysis , uncertainty quantification , computational science , data mining , databases , and visualization . Turing award winner Jim Gray imagined data science as a "fourth paradigm" of science ( empirical , theoretical , computational and now data-driven) and asserted t...