Data Science jargon buster – for Data Scientists

Data Science is a technical field that applies scientific rigour to the understanding of business data and the associated processes and products. Like traditional science, it can be full of jargon that leads to unclear business messages and a failure of findings to be understood and acted upon. Having reviewed countless Data Science reports and presentations that are not ready for business readers, I thought it would be useful to provide a list of business terms to replace Data Science jargon.

Data Science Jargon Buster

Term	Data Science Jargon	Business term
1	Factor / independent variable	inputs
2	Dependent variable	metric / KPI/ Outcome
3	Monotonically increasing	always increasing
4	Clustering	Grouping
5	Classification	Labelling
6	Regression	Prediction
7	Correlation	Relation, association
8	Null Hypothesis	Status quo
9	Type 1 error	False positive / wrong prediction
10	Type 2 error	Failed to detect the effect
11	Sensitivity / Recall	Completeness
12	harmonic mean, geometric mean	average
13	Trivial	straight forward

Eradicating Data Science jargon from your team

Do you have some jargon you would like to eradicate from your team? Get in touch! Let’s build this list together.