Opinion: Working together, data scientists and cancer researchers can transform cancer treatment
At a time when data and data science are increasingly essential to improving cancer care, oncologists and cancer researchers often lack the training needed to understand and leverage the data to their fullest extent. Similarly, data scientists often lack an understanding of cancer biology and a patient’s journey through the disease, both of which are necessary to gather and query data appropriately to answer a myriad of important biological and clinical questions.
Take, for example, a case recently discussed at a big data meeting hosted by Susan G. Komen, the organization we work for: A data scientist constructed a survey to gather information about a sample of women. One question asked about the number of children the respondent had. If she skipped the question, the data scientist dealt with the missing data by assigning zero to the respondent’s answer. A cancer researcher then analyzed the data to glean information about family size and was surprised that a large percentage of respondents appeared to have no children.
