Why Statistics Is the Backbone of Data Science (opens in new tab)

One of the biggest surprises I had while learning data science was realizing that Python isn't the hard part. You can learn Python in a few weeks. You can become comfortable with pandas pretty quickly. You can even train a machine learning model by following a tutorial. But none of that means you understand your data. That's where statistics comes in. A lot of beginners (myself included) focus on learning tools first because they're exciting. New libraries, dashboards, machine learning models...