Data Science is the interdisciplinary field combining statistics, mathematics, and programming to extract insights from data and drive evidence-based decision-making. It spans the full analytical lifecycle—from collecting and cleaning raw data to building predictive models, validating results, and deploying solutions that solve real-world business and scientific problems. Understanding the foundational workflow is essential: data rarely arrives clean or analysis-ready, and a single misstep in preprocessing or evaluation can invalidate an otherwise sophisticated model.