Lessons From Between the White Lines for Isolated Data Scientists

ABSTRACT

Many current and future data scientists will be “isolated”—working alone or in small teams within a larger organization. This isolation brings certain challenges as well as freedoms. Drawing on my considerable experience both working in the professional sports industry and teaching in academia, I discuss troubled waters likely to be encountered by newly minted data scientists and offer advice about how to navigate them. Neither the issues raised nor the advice given are particular to sports and should be applicable to a wide range of knowledge domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Applications and case studies
• Education
• Other
• Sports statistics
• Statistical computing

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Nicole Lazar, Lance Waller, Nicholas Horton, Luke Bornn, Jenny Bryan, and Hadley Wickham for helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Notes

1 There is a well-read Isolated Statistician mailing list for statisticians in industry and academia in similar positions.

2 https://twitter.com/gshotwell/status/577485681146097664

3 Please see https://help.github.com/articles/good-resources-for-learning-git-and-github/GitHub Help for a list of resources for learning how to use git and GitHub.

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Spark

6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron

7 https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/etl/index.html

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

12 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/my-time-with-the-architect-of-the-astros-ground-control-database

13 For a terrifying story of a rogue data scientist, read about Chris Correa (The Associated Press 2016). Correa held a job similar to mine with the St. Louis Cardinals, but was convicted of hacking into the Houston Astros’ proprietary database and was subsequently sentenced to nearly four years in prison (http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/07/18/cardinals-chris-correa-hacks-astros-prison-sentence).

14 https://www.coursera.org/

15 http://www.datacamp.com

16 http://www.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/48166/moneyball-before-moneyball-was-cool

17 http://www.si.com/vault/2011/09/26/106111997/the-art-of-winning-an-even-more-unfair-game

18 http://grantland.com/the-triangle/pittsburgh-pirates-mike-fitzgerald-mit-sabermetric-road-show/

19 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-28/extreme-moneyball-houston-astros-jeff-luhnow-lets-data-reign

20 https://twitter.com/octonion

21 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/sports/baseball/michael-fishman-solving-the-yankee-equation.html

22 http://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/mets/post/_/id/46665/stat-guru-baumer-leaving-mets-to-teach

23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svengali

24 https://www.baseballamerica.com/today/features/050107debate.html

25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_knowledge

26 http://www.r-bloggers.com

27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicollinearity

28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_(statisti-cs)

29 I was introduced to this term by Andrew Bray of Reed College.

30 http://mlb.com/team/front_office.jsp?c_id=mil

31 http://mlb.com/team/front_office.jsp?c_id=ana

32 http://mlb.com/team/front_office.jsp?c_id=phi

33 https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsebastian

34 https://www.linkedin.com/in/agaldi1