From the drafts: Data science as function fitting

From the drafts: Data science as function fitting

Let’s dig out another article from my drafts bin, something I don’t think I was ever going to finish. This draft was titled “Data Science as function fitting”. It begins: In the buzzword-ridden age of AI hype, perhaps there’s value in having more unmagical ways of talking about data science. My most unmagical description, is that data science is basically function fitting. It’s like what Excel does when you ask Excel to draw a trendline through …