<p>I think my answer may have the advantage of seeing how things have played out in comparison to others who have answered earlier, but...</p>

<p>I think the data science site is <em>very</em> necessary. It's true that there's plenty of overlap between statistics questions and data science questions. There's also plenty of overlap between statistics questions and mathematics, but I don't think anyone believes this means that CV should be merged into Mathematics anytime soon. </p>

<p>And as such, the questions data scientists have are not necessarily the same as traditional statisticians. I think most of us would agree that "how do you run neural networks on a cluster efficiently?" doesn't exactly belong here, but it doesn't exactly belong on SO either. It very naturally belongs on DS.</p>

<p>Lots of statisticians feel like data scientist is just a sexier name for statistician or data analyst. But I would say the distribution of challenges faced on a daily basis by people with the title data scientist is fairly different than the distribution of challenges faced by people with the title statistician. Data science is just as much, if not more so, about handling data as it is about analyzing. Given that they do have a unique cross section of problems, it would make sense that they have their own discussion groups. </p>

<p>Plus, I don't want to have wade through any more questions about whether we could use gradient descent in place of maximum likelihood estimation (50% jk).</p>
