The amount of digital data generated in a single year now completely overwhelms humankind’s capacity to manage it, understand it and, more importantly, mine it. This phenomenon is referred to as the Data Deluge. Data Scientists are specialists, normally with a strong background in computing, statistics, and machine learning, who use their skills and expertise to find patterns and trends in data that can be used to make better strategic and tactical decisions. In many ways, being a data scientist is like being a detective. It involves skill, knowledge, expertise, creativity, great attention to detail, and most of all, perseverance. The ultimate aim is to determine trends, discover hidden patterns, and obtain business insight from the data. Companies use data analytics to make better business decisions and outperform their competitors. The worldwide demand for data scientists has never been so high.

Managing and analysing large datasets has now become an essential part of modern finance, retail, marketing, social science, research and development, medicine, industry, academia, and government. The curriculum of this MSc programme is therefore designed to provide students with a solid grounding in the theory as well as the methods and techniques used in data science. From the onset, the industry stakeholders insisted on exposure to the basic ‘core’ theory in data science including discrete and continuous mathematical concepts, statistics, probability, and the theoretical foundations of machine learning and data analytics. This will ensure that, upon completion of the taught component, students will have a solid background in the theory that is considered a pre-requisite for data science practitioners.

There has never been a better time to study data science.