US media: Big data rise data scientists become popular occupations

Chris Farel, 28, is a http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13768.html "> Data scientist," The Wall Street Journal website reported August 9. The job title did not exist 3 years ago, but has since become one of the hottest corners of the high-tech labour market. Retailers, banks, heavy-equipment factories and matchmaking firms want experts to extract and analyze large amounts of data from the Internet, machines and smartphones, triggering a competition to find and train such talent.

Employers say the ideal candidate must have more than traditional market research skills: a resolution pattern in Chiba data that is constantly available from different sources, inferring customer behavior based on patterns, and compiling statistical models that specify behavioral triggers.

For example, Etsy, an e-commerce operator, who spent years digging through medical records and looking for early signs of breast cancer, is now compiling statistical models to figure out what words people use when they search the company's Web site for a new fashion they see on the street.

At the mobile payment start-up company Square, a cognitive psychologist who has compiled statistical models to examine how people change their political beliefs, is now looking for behavioral patterns to identify which traders are more likely to be asked to refund their customers.

Some of these experiments have caused people to panic. Facebook has recently become the focus of an experiment. In the experiment, the company's data science team tried to manipulate people's moods by altering news-driven content.

Recruiters say data scientists with only two years of experience can earn 200,000 to 300,000 dollars a year. The scarcity of such talent is reflected in numbers. 6,000 companies are hiring at the end of last year, according to data from one website.