Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to Launch Online Course "Introduction to Data Science for Working Adults"

Explanation

The Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has begun recruiting participants for its free online course, "Introduction to Data Science for Working Adults," which anyone can take. Data science is an academic field and technology that reads patterns and meaning from large amounts of data to help with decision-making and forecasting.

Underlying it is "statistics." For example, looking only at the average can lead to a misunderstanding of the actual situation. Only by also examining the "spread (variance)" of the data and the shape of its distribution can one read it correctly. Even if two classes have the same average test score, the meaning is completely different depending on whether the scores are clustered together or widely dispersed.

Today is an era in which data is gathered in every setting, from news opinion polls to online shopping purchase histories. The "ability to handle data correctly"—to read the meaning behind the numbers—is becoming an essential form of literacy regardless of whether one comes from the humanities or the sciences. Learning statistics also means acquiring the ability not to be "fooled" by the numbers that flood the world around us.