An Investigation on Educating Data Scientists with Practical Skills through Problem-Based Learning

Abstract

On educating data scientists, it is necessary to foster not only technical skills of programming and statistics, but also problem-identifying and problem-solving ability. The authors' faculty, Social Information Science department, University of Hyogo, in cooperation with Supermarket KOHYO (a supermarket chain in Kinki district), and Macromill, Inc. (a marketing research company) carried out half year program of a PBL (Problem-Based learning) for all of the first grade students (101 in total). The program treated real survey data of approximately 30000 consumers collected by the Macromill, and the students tried to make proposals for solving each problem of the seven real supermarkets belonging to the KOHYO chain. According to the questionnaires after the PBL, major of the students noticed what skills are necessary for them to be professional data scientists. The teachers also found some issues for managing practical PBL in large scale.