We are a company of data science consultants. A data science consultant assists companies and organisations to get the best value out of their data. It’s an interesting job with a mix of the technical side (such as data analysis, statistics, and software engineering) and the business side (understanding problems in a particular industry).
A consultant is usually hired by an organisation because they needed an expert with skills that may be hard to source in-house. For example, an in-house data science team may not have enough experience in natural language processing or another niche area of data science (Fast Data Science is a boutique data science consultancy specialising in natural language processing, or NLP). Furthermore, many companies are not necessarily tech-focused. For this reason, corporations are increasingly turning to data science consultants to fulfil their needs in this area.
A data science consultant’s job is varied and no two days are the same. Recently, we have been
Check out our case studies page if you’re feeling inspired!
Our analytics expertise can help you extract value from unstructured data, such as PDFs, in order to better plan your business strategy. We can analyse your data and present it in a jargon-free way using graphical techniques, and move on to building explainable predictive models.
For example, if you want to understand the causes of customer churn or employee attrition, we can identify key correlations and postulate causes and strategic actions, and even train and deploy a machine learning model which can highlight any employee or customer at risk. Our main area of focus is natural language processing (NLP). The manager, Thomas Wood, studied a Masters in 2008 at Cambridge University in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology and since then he has been working exclusively in machine learning and data science. In 2018, Thomas Wood founded Fast Data Science to deliver data science consultancy services.
Examples of what a data science consultant can do for a business include:
We always begin with the question you want to answer: why are the customers leaving the business? what is the major cause of breakdowns in my manufacturing process? how can we identify the most at-risk students?
Following a rigorous and numbers-based approach, we proceed to find answers to the question using statistics and machine learning algorithms. At all stages we keep you on-board and provide easily interpretable visualisations of our findings, complete documentation, and interactive handover workshops. We work with both traditional machine learning techniques as well as the state of the art such as neural networks. We normally use Python for our data science consulting work, but can adapt to your technology stack. We often develop front ends for any models that we deploy.
We will not use unnecessarily complex or over-hyped models. If another data science consultant tells you they will solve your problem using an LLM connected to Blockchain, come to us instead and we might be able to give you a model you can work with on pen and paper! We prioritise simple models (Occam’s Razor) and make sure that the client is onboard with all the technology used.
We recognise that generative AI is a tool in the toolkit and we will use it for some of our projects with the client’s permission. At present, organisational policies on generative AI vary and there may be restrictions because of either the opaque (non-explainable) way that it generates predictions, as well as objections to the idea of sending data to a third party provider. However, times are changing. But it should be noted that simple problems that require only a regression model can be solved more cheaply and reliably with that regression model. Generative AI is exciting but it isn’t the answer to everything!
Data science consultant - London
In many industries such as healthcare, insurance, pharmaceuticals and legal, it is common for large amounts of the data to be stored in an unstructured format, for example PDFs, Excels, and other documents, which may be stored on the cloud, on on-premise servers, on employees’ laptops, or even physically. These kinds of documents are particularly difficult to analyse but we have a proven track record of extracting useful information from gold-mines such as this for a series of high-profile clients. Our area of focus is natural language processing, which allows us to analyse data in free text, or even in a multitude of languages. Imagine you are an executive in an insurance company and you have a collection of a thousand ship inspection reports, which are written in plain text, submitted in Word or PDF form, and by people of different nationalities, in highly technical language. You want to know how many vessels failed the fire safety inspection. Do you:
Data science is being increasingly adopted across the healthcare sector. This technology is sometimes called healthtech or MedTech.
As an example, machine learning models can predict workforce attrition, patient outcomes, or A&E or emergency room demand. Natural language processing can be used to analyse clinical data in text form and categorise information by MeSH terms.
We have worked on a number of healthcare data science consulting projects, such as:
The technology we use for your project depends on you and your organisation’s preferences, but all other things being equal, we will choose the simplest tool to answer your questions in an efficient and explainable way.
You’ll be pleased to find out that data science is one of a company’s operations whose impact is most easily quantified – after sales, of course!
Taking an example from one of our past clients, our data science analysis identified a key pain point in their customer sign-up form which was causing a percentage of the customers to drop out. We estimated from research that an improvement would result in a 7% increase in sign-ups.
The CEO of the company was sceptical, so we ran an A/B test for two weeks. Half of potential customers were presented with the old form, and half with the new form. After two weeks, the expected increase of 7% did indeed occur. The company promptly switched the website over completely to the new design.
How much would your company benefit from a data science consultant identifying quick wins like this?
Our data science consultants have worked on a number of projects for major companies recently, including:
Please visit our Portfolio for more information, or simply contact us for a chat.
What we can do for you
