Data Science in the Kitchen

In teaching data science, using images, examples from other disciplines, analogies, and metaphors to convey concepts and ideas that may seem quite abstract, particularly to students who lack a quantitative background, is often useful. During one of our lectures, we realized that it is possible to describe the various phases of data science analysis, from data collection to the communication of results, by paralleling them with the typical phases of cooking a meal. The paper develops this similarity through the various stages of data science modeling, providing simple and easy-to-understand storytelling that allows a non-technical audience to grasp statistical concepts. Each of these phases is described from the “cooking a meal” perspective, and the corresponding data science stage is illustrated in a “lesson from the kitchen” section.