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Milestones and Figures in Data Science History

Data Science

Test your knowledge on historical dates, key pioneers, and milestone numbers in data science history.

data science machine learning history statistics

8 Questions Hard Ages 15+ Oct 20, 2026

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About this Study Set

This study set covers Data Science through 8 practice questions. Test your knowledge on historical dates, key pioneers, and milestone numbers in data science history. Every question includes the correct answer so you can learn as you go — pick any format above to get started.

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Browse all 8 questions from the Milestones and Figures in Data Science History study set below. Each question shows the correct answer — select a study format above to practice interactively.

1 In what year did William S. Cleveland publish the landmark paper 'Data Science: An Action Plan for Expanding the Technical Areas of the Field of Statistics'?

A 1997
B 2001
C 2005
D 2008

2 In April of which year was the data science competition platform Kaggle founded by Anthony Goldbloom?

A 2008
B 2010
C 2012
D 2014

3 In the 2012 ImageNet (ILSVRC) competition, AlexNet achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of approximately what percentage, vastly outperforming the runner-up score of 26.2%?

A 15.3%
B 19.8%
C 8.4%
D 22.1%

4 Who co-authored the October 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled 'Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century' alongside Thomas H. Davenport?

A DJ Patil
B Jeff Hammerbacher
C Nate Silver
D Andrew Ng

5 In what year did Wes McKinney publicly open-source the Python data analysis library pandas?

A 2006
B 2009
C 2011
D 2013

6 In 2001, which statistician published the seminal paper formally introducing the 'Random Forests' algorithm in the journal Machine Learning?

A Jerome H. Friedman
B Leo Breiman
C Robert Tibshirani
D Trevor Hastie

7 Who originally started the popular Python machine learning package 'scikit-learn' as a Google Summer of Code project in 2007?

A David Cournapeau
B Fabian Pedregosa
C Gael Varoquaux
D Travis Oliphant

8 On September 18, 2009, which team won the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize competition by achieving a 10.06% improvement over Cinematch's accuracy?

A BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos
B The Ensemble
C Opera Solutions
D Grand Prize Winners

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