Data Science in Action

Abstract

In recent years, data science emerged as a new and important discipline. It can be viewed as an amalgamation of classical disciplines like statistics, data mining, databases, and distributed systems. Existing approaches need to be combined to turn abundantly available data into value for individuals, organizations, and society. Moreover, new challenges have emerged, not just in terms of size (“Big Data”) but also in terms of the questions to be answered. This book focuses on the analysis of behavior based on event data. Process mining techniques use event data to discover processes, check compliance, analyze bottlenecks, compare process variants, and suggest improvements. In later chapters, we will show that process mining provides powerful tools for today’s data scientist. However, before introducing the main topic of the book, we provide an overview of the data science discipline.