Data Science: the impact of statistics

Abstract

In this paper, we substantiate our premise that statistics is one of the most important disciplines to provide tools and methods to find structure in and to give deeper insight into data, and the most important discipline to analyze and quantify uncertainty. We give an overview over different proposed structures of Data Science and address the impact of statistics on such steps as data acquisition and enrichment, data exploration, data analysis and modeling, validation and representation and reporting. Also, we indicate fallacies when neglecting statistical reasoning.