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The principle function of the Data Scientist is to extract meaningful information from digital data of all types. At Western Governors University, the Data Scientist is responsible for synthesizing meaningful and actionable information from diverse data sources to aid student progression towards graduation and support other university priorities. The Data Scientist should be adept at working with all types of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data using a tool set of R, Python, SQL, and web-scale data technologies like Map-Reduce and Hadoop.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Identify new data sources that will improve the diversification of university data.
  • Deep knowledge of various data sources (government, open source APIs, web scraping, etc.).
  • Ability to write and process complex SQL queries.
  • Experience extracting meaning data from social networking platforms.
  • Basic understanding of regular expressions to extract data from semi-structured and unstructed data sources.
  • Understanding of online web scraping to get data from sources that don’t offer API data access.

• Create predictive models leveraging machine learning algorithms.
  • Traditional statistical models (logistic regression, classification algorithms, tree models, etc.).
  • Machine learning algorithms (neural networks, decision trees, association rules).
  • Text mining and natural language processing.

• Experience with very large data sets.
  • Background in setting up and maintaining big data processes.
  • Experience with Hadoop, Hive, and HBase in the Amazon AWS environment.
  • Efficient processing of large amounts of unstructured data.

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:

• R Programming
• Scripting language (python, java script)
• SQL Programming
• Business writing and communication

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Graduate degree in quantitative discipline
• Three years relevant work experience.
• Or
• Bachelor’s degree in quantitative discipline
• Seven years relevant work experience.

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As an equal opportunity employer, WGU recognizes that our strength lies in our people. We are committed to diversity.