[mswen]

Agreed it is just my opinion. And rarely, if ever, will you find all of these skills in the same person. More often it will be a small team of people each with 1 or 2 specialties plus some other areas they are reasonably competent at.

Most of what I have been reading on the topic seems to define data science as the intersection of the kinds of things I have listed. I guess my larger point was that each of these areas have their own learning curve and some like statistics or machine learning benefit from formal training. A person does not become a data scientist by reading blogs and journals.