Hey everyone! Welcome to Rise Networks Blog! In this article I explained data science in an easy to understand concept. The term Data Science is relatively new, Wikipedia defined it as
“ an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data“
Data Science seeks to analyze and predict real life situations using data, it encompasses computer science, mathematics and business knowledge. A data scientist deals with structured and unstructured data, he/she does everything that has to do with cleaning data, data preparation, data analysis and data interpretation.
A data scientist job is to solve real company problems using data, it requires making an impact using data.
Data Analyst or Data Scientist?
Oftentimes we confuse the role of a data analyst for that of a data scientist. The roles both have to do with data but also have their differences.
- A data analyst analyzes past data, finds insights and describes the trends that happened in the organization or business. A data analyst helps us to understand what has happened in the past, this helps the business to make better future decisions. While a data scientist interprets the already analysed data and uses it to predict informed future outcomes, this implies that a data scientist’s work is in the future.
- A data analyst deals with structured data using SQL while a data scientist deal with both structured and unstructured data(SQL, NoSQL)
- A data analyst focuses on the past while a data scientist focuses on the future
- Top skills required of a data analyst include data visualization, data mining, data analysis, data modeling, R or SAS, SQL and database management while the skills required of a data scientist include software development, programming abilities(Python and/or Javascript), data mining, data mining, machine learning.