“To better understand its importance to public policy, it’s useful to distinguish between two broad (though highly interdependent) trends that define data science. The first is a gradual expansion of the types of data and statistical methods that can be used to glean insights into policy studies, such as predictive analytics, clustering, big data methods, and the analysis of networks, text, and images. The second trend is the emergence of a set of tools and the formalization of standards in the data analysis process.”
