The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians

Abstract

The goal of exploratory data analysis or data mining is making sense of data. We develop theory and algorithms that help us understand our data, with the goal that this helps formulating better hypotheses. The role of statisticians is to provide methods that give detailed insight in how data is structured: characterising distributions in easily understandable terms, showing the most informative patterns, associations, correlations, etc. Statisticians are part of the big data science wave but which part exactly next to data accessibility, data communication and visualization?