Teaching the Foundations of Data Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach

The paucity of human resource skills to acquire, effectively analyze, and extract valuable insights from data has overtaken data acquisition as the principal challenge facing data-inspired analysis in organizations (Dhar 2012). This scarcity motivates the need for training well-qualified data scientists able to generate insights from large amounts of complex data hoarded by organizations (Davenport and Patil 2012). In 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute reported a shortage of between 140,000 and 190,000 workers competent in data analytics (Manyika, Chui, Brown, Bughin, Dobbs, and Roxburgh 2011).