WHY IS BLOCKCHAIN THE NEXT BIG THING FOR DATA SCIENCE?

 In brief:  

Blockchain technology is a hot topic nowadays, especially with the recent boom in decentralised finance, the exponential growth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and the ongoing NFT craze (it was announced this week that NFT is Collins Dictionary’s word of the year). From a Data Scientist’s perspective, blockchains are also an exciting source of high-quality data that can be used to tackle a wide range of interesting problems using statistics and ML. In contrast to traditional data sources (e.g., centrally controlled corporate databases), blockchains by design provide several benefits that are important for Data Science applications, This Analytics Insight article argues that blockchain will be the next big thing for data science and insists that blockchain will improve data science by allowing data traceability, allowing for real-time analysis, ensuring the accuracy of data, making data sharing less difficult, ensuring trust, enhancing data integrity, encoded transactions and data lakes.

Why this is important:

 Blockchain is something that we will all be aware of but have perhaps not considered how it’s likely to interact with data science. This article gives us another insight into the direction our industry may take in the near future.