Aesthetic Data Science

Vitruvius insisted that buildings, or any other structure, should be beautiful. The aesthetics of a building causes more than just a pleasant feeling. Architecturally designed places stimulate our thinking, increase our well-being, improve our productivity and stimulate creativity.

While it is evident that buildings need to be pleasing to the eye, the aesthetics of data products might not be so obvious. The requirement for aesthetic data science is not a call for beautification and obfuscation of the ugly details of the results. The process of cleaning and analyzing data is inherently complex. Presenting the results of this process is a form of storytelling that reduces this complexity to ensure that a data product is understandable.

The data science value chain starts with reality, described by data. This data is converted to knowledge, which managers use to influence reality to meet their objectives. This chain from reality to human knowledge contains four transformations...