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While it’s an irrefutable fact that data science brings immense benefits for businesses in the form of remarkable efficiency and accuracy in decision making, it’s also true that it brings with itself the toil of crafting a recondite pipeline. And to build a working analytics system, data scientists master the inter-disciplinary knowledge that extracts the crux of otherwise out-of-context data.
Now, as we’ll make it clear to you, organizations want to leverage a simple and intuitive way towards data science that ideally empowers anyone to harness its powers. For this, technology has created a non-technical paradigm of data science: the no-code Data Science.
With no-code Data Science, it literally becomes possible for anyone to apply data science principles and process data into legitimate insights as accurately as with code. Combined with data literacy, users can drag and drop data nodes on the project screen and build an AI within minutes. Just that’s how simple it is.
This article disseminates everything about no-code Data Science- covering the context of no-code technology and its working, best no-code AI tools, citizen data scientists and how to become one, and a note on the future of Data Science with no-code platforms.
Stick by to discover how aspiring professionals can learn no-code Data Science at the comfort of their homes with live-sessions by certified experts.
Jump to your Intended Topic in no-code Data Science
1- What exactly is Data Science?, Skills, and Supply Gap.
2- The no-code Movement and Data Science.
3- List of best no-code AI platforms, and details.
4- Can I become a citizen data scientist? Pretty Easily!
5- How no-code data science tools help organizations?
6- No-code Data Science a threat to the job security of Data Scientists?
What’s Data Science?
Data Science is the application of machine intelligence to make business decisions in the shortest time and with greater wisdom. This machine intelligence is created by Data Scientists who blend statistics, artificial intelligence, and domain knowledge together over vast volumes of data.
In simple terms, a data scientist rounds up relevant business data, cleanses and structures the data, and builds statistical models to look for unseen patterns. These patterns (as validated through historical data) act as knowledge for business managers and help them make business decisions.
What are the Skills of a Data Scientist?
Primarily, a data scientist requires hands-on expertise in: mathematics and statistics, programming languages (Python, R and SQL), and application domain knowledge (visit our dedicated career guide if you wish to understand more about skills of data scientist).
Scarcity in Supply of Data Scientists
The toil aspiring individuals take to become professional data scientists, as well as the effortful work in constructing an analytics pipeline, results in scarcity of Data Scientists. On the other hand, the demand for data scientists is more than ever, with companies intrigued to leverage the competitive advantage data science provides.
This supply-demand gap becomes an inspiration for engineers to create tools that offer intuitive data science capabilities. They envision easier accessibility to data and analytics with non-specialists generating and creating complex statistical models with as little effort as possible. This gives rise to non-traditional data science roles that require abstract knowledge of data and analytics compared to the profound expertise in statistics and programming required by professional data scientists.
Gartner termed these emerging data science roles as Citizen data scientists and extrapolated them as dominant players who can maximize an organization’s D&A strategy. Building on Gartner’s view, no-code tools and automation are two key drivers that can empower citizen data scientists in successfully conducting analytics operations.
Read further as we deep-dive into what’s no-code Data Science.
What’s no-code Data Science? It all started with the no-code Movement
The no-code movement emphasizes technology usage for everyone, offering non-technical persons to build things such as websites and data analytics applications. The movement solely exists to empower every individual to implement their unique ideas and use the power of technology in easiest ways. Note: to gain first-hand account, visit the no-code platforms such as MarkerPad and Nocode.tech.
As the no-code movement expanded across technology disciplines, data science gurus also saw greater enablement, a platform idea that makes it possible for anyone to build data science models without having to code. Using these platforms, implementing data science workflows has become extremely easy and quick thanks to the drag-and-drop layout. There’s literally no coding involved that was earlier required to write and execute each step along the data science hierarchy (including feature engineering and model building).
So how does no-code Data Science work?
No-code data science platforms leverage the power of programming (at the backend) to create intuitive drag-and-drop functionalities at the user interface. The four core characteristics of a no-code data science platform are:
- Visual programming that provides graphical layout with drag-and-drop capabilities. Users pick a component (or node) and drop it on the project window before building their logical data hierarchy.
- Additional flexibility of embedded code editor as in Data Query, for customization of processes.
- Provision of APIs that lets users import their no-code prediction data to their applications, or visualization tools such as Power BI and Looker etc.,
- Hundreds of pre-built analytics components such as data readers, data joiners, and complex statistical models etc., save hours of time and effort for data science teams.
AI is now possible without coding! The Best no-code AI platforms for all business users
Following is a list of top no-code AI platforms that cover all applications of artificial intelligence including Data Science (Learn Data Science vs. AI). As you’ll witness below, with these tools, data science is possible without python.
Microsoft Lobe
Microsoft takes the no-code machine learning experience for non-specialists to an ultimate level with its Lobe application. It comes as a downloadable, free application that has an incredibly creative yet super intuitive graphical layout that makes sense of ML to any layman.
Users start with uploading their data onto Lobe. This is example data (also known as historical data) using which users make an ML model learn and discriminate between a variety of examples. Once imported, Lobe automatically trains a ML model (also selected by Lobe) and displays a model performance report. This is where users can see and verify if the ML model actually predicts in the way they expect it to. For example, users can upload new data if the model displays wrong predictions. Once fixed, use Lobe to export the model onto any application.
Download and train your ML model on the go using Lobe. Watch how Lobe trains an ML model in minutes time with its super intuitive layout .
Akkio
Akkio markets itself as one of the best no-code data science tools in that it offers fastest model training in a work environment that’s highly intuitive. It’s with these features that professionals from sales, marketing, and finance find Akkio as a promising no-code platform for predictions such as customer churn, subscription score and customer acquisition.
Akkio lets users upload .csv files or integrate data from sources such as Salesforce, Google BigQuery, and Google Sheets. Once uploaded, Akkio lists all variables from historical data and allows multi-select variables intended for prediction. It takes almost 30s for Akkio to train an ML model based on the historical data and automatically selecting the best model without needing users to select on their own. Because it’s critical for users to learn how an ML model reaches a decision or in other words identify if the model is biased on a feature or a group of features, Akkio brings an intuitive model performance report. This insight report shows model performance metrics, percentage of individual features contributing in the prediction, and even creates prediction cases. Users can directly connect Akkio’s no-code ML model with data sources such as Web Application to predict data in real time. That’s how simple ML is with Akkio.
Visit Akkio to get a free trial of Akkio Application.
Google Auto ML
Another no-code platform in the list of best no-code AL tools is Google Auto ML. Auto ML covers the whole gamut of ML (ranging from data science to pure ML tasks), providing a simple, no-code solution for custom business needs.
Within just four simple steps, people with limited machine learning expertise can generate predictions on their custom data. Within Auto ML’s User Interface, users begin with uploading their ‘labeled’ data set, then selecting ‘train’ on a custom ML model, ‘evaluate’ model-quality analysis and statistics, and select ‘predict’ to generate results on their data.
Google AutoML is a paid application.
Amazon SageMaker
Amazon provides the best no-code machine learning experience for developers and data scientists alike with its incredible no-code AI tool called SageMaker. With its intensely rich machine learning capabilities, non-specialists, data scientists and developers save time and effort in data preparation, building, training, and deployment of models.
Starting with feature engineering, SageMaker Data Wrangler automatically builds features on users’ selected data. Users can save different versions of features in the SageMaker Feature Store and select and use them for model training. Now, trusting an ML is another problem that SageMaker gracefully handles with its SageMaker Clarify. It suggests a balanced feature set by checking for issues such as: biases towards a single feature. An individual feature’s role can also be inspected using Clarify. Once a model is trained, the SageMaker Debugger identifies improvements in an ML model by measuring for example CPU memory, and number of violations on training data. Finally, SageMager pipelines helps data scientists and developers to automate the whole ML development process in a single click.
See how Amazon SageMaker expedites a data science workflow within minutes.
Users can try Amazon SageMaker for free for 2-months after they sign-up to AWS Cloud.
KNIME
Competing with top no-code AI platforms, KNIME Analytics platform successfully delivers the simplicity and ease of building machine learning algorithms for data science applications (check out KNIME Reviews at Gartner Peer Reviews). It’s a visual, no code analytics platform that lets all business users create powerful machine learning algorithms by simply dragging data nodes on KNIME workbench.
Users pick visual data nodes as per business requirement and drop over KNIME project screen. A logical sequence is created within minutes.
KNIME Analytics Software is absolutely free to download and use.
As you’ve studied the above best no-code data science tools, we don’t want to miss yet another top no-code platform that’s loved by its users. Obviously AI is a complete data science team and offers capabilities that merge and clean data, and perform statistical work.
Become a citizen data scientist or simply save time and effort in the tedious building of ML algorithms.
At Dice Analytics, KNIME L2 certified instructors teach in an 8-weeks complete KNIME analytics program, taking you through basics of Data Science to advanced use cases such as anomaly detection, fraud detection, and social media clustering.
Visit detailed course outline for no-code Data Science at Dice Analytics.
How no-code Data Science serves organizations?
No-code Data Science primarily serves those organizations who lack key resources such as data science professionals, technology infrastructure, and time in developing a mature data analytics ecosystem. Further, no-code data science helps business executives gain an intuitive view of Data Science, leading to quality data governance.
Learn more about the right way of leveraging Data Science in business.
The idea of no-code data science is also backed by credible market analysis. According to Gartner, citizen data scientists can ‘accelerate’ organizations into AI and ML without spending huge costs and efforts in complex implementation. Equipped with the right tools, non-specialists as well as professional data scientists can perform intricate diagnostic analysis as well as create models that leverage predictive or prescriptive analytics, using simplified technology platforms (view Data Science tasks in 2020).
Another Gartner Trend Insight report on low code technologies highlights an interesting fact on the utility of no-code data science. According to the report, within an organization, the majority of employees constitute business technologists who have an average technology grasp. This chunk of the audience (avg. 41% among all employees) is already using low-code and no-code technology solutions for data and analytics.
Does no-code Data Science pose a threat to the job security of Data Scientists?
Although no-code Data Science empowers non-technical persons to gracefully take out advanced analytics, it doesn’t mean it’s the end for professional Data Scientists.
- As we’ve stated in section 2, how the no-code platforms come with advanced functionalities such as code editors that let’s data scientists write code to customize workflows. This brings more flexibility for professional data scientists who can use their coding skills and data science expertise in building competing data science solutions.
Hence, no-code platforms truly facilitate a data scientist who can use their programming knowledge to craft immensely valuable and innovative data models that bring a powerful difference in their work.
- Apart from the above, no-code platforms salvage data scientists from repetitive coding; building or revamping code for every new project. With no-code tools, data scientists can focus on the design of analytics pipeline making their work more meaningful and interesting.
- Another exclusive benefit of no-code platforms for professional data scientists is the use of subject expertise to create breakthrough data analytics environments for no-coders; such as with the open source no-code data science platform KNIME. Data scientists can opt for developing their commercial proprietary tools, and supply service layers and support at KNIME.
Concluding: Data Science is for everyone with no-code platforms
From credible market research and subjective analysis presented above, it’s certain that the reins of data science is safe at the hands of no-code platforms. With no-code data science it becomes extremely simple to create data models without writing a single line of code. This not only empowers citizen data scientists, but brings a lot more opportunities for professional data scientists as well. It’s with the simplicity of technology that organizations now perform intricate diagnostic analysis as well as predictive or prescriptive analytics without investing plentiful resources.
Visit Dice Analytics’ no-code Data Science remote, live training.
