Personalized Medicine, Bedtime Stories and Data Science

Brain likes alikes. That simple statement is actually a brief summary of human psychology that touches the core of every interaction humankind has ever done throughout history. It is indeed possible to come up with several cases and even example couples who seem to have exactly opposite characters that have nothing in common and still in love, but believe me these are just the exceptions rather than rule. That, I am quite sure of.

In data science, especially when it comes to conveying its results to the stakeholders, keeping this statement in mind while preparing the deliverables; i.e. reports, visuals and graphs, is not only helpful but also game-changer for the projects. After all, the value of data analytics is directly proportional with the power of the message it is received (yes, not ‘delivered’!).

To make data analytics results powerful, data scientists have been exploring/discovering numerous ways, algorithms and techniques in the recent years. Yet, little attention has been paid to the link between business and technical people and even less discussions were made on how to improve the communication between them. As a data scientist, I believe this is what we are vastly lagging behind and more importantly, where the future of data science lies.

Back in my PhD years, all we were discussing was ‘personalized medicine’ and how pharma needs to personalize the drugs and doses on the basis of individual test results. Then, when I moved to industry, these…