A framework for understanding data science

Abstract

The objective of this research is to provide a framework with which the data science community can understand, define, and develop data science as a field of inquiry. The framework is based on the classical reference framework (axiology, ontology, epistemology, methodology) used for 200 years to define knowledge discovery paradigms and disciplines in the humanities, sciences, algorithms, and now data science. I augmented it for automated problem-solving with (methods, technology, community). The resulting data science reference framework is used to define the data science knowledge discovery paradigm in terms of the philosophy of data science addressed in previous papers and the data science problem-solving paradigm, i.e., the data science method, and the data science problem-solving workflow, both addressed in this paper. The framework is a much called for unifying framework for data science as it contains the components required to define data science. For insights to better understand data science, this paper uses the framework to define the emerging, often enigmatic, data science problem-solving paradigm and workflow, and to compare them with their well-understood scientific counterparts, scientific problem-solving paradigm and workflow.