We’re probably the luckiest generation in human history. We’re no longer in the Neolithic Age or the Industrial Age; we’ve entered the Information Age. Advanced information technologies, particularly computers and networks, have transformed human life. We can take a flight from our hometown to another place thousands of miles away in less than half a day. We can make a doctor’s appointment using a smartphone and attend the appointment through a video call, if we prefer. We can order almost anything from online stores and get it delivered within days or even hours.
These transformations have been accompanied by the accumulation of tremendous amounts of data over the past couple of decades. The work of processing and analyzing this data has contributed to the emergence of a new interdisciplinary subject: data science. As a behavioral scientist, I spend a significant amount of time dealing with data, so you might say that I’m applying data science to behavioral research. It takes more than paper and pencil to process data of this magnitude, however. Instead, I’ve been writing code to clean data and run statistical models with a wonderful programming language: Python.