Difference Between A Data Analyst And A Data Scientist

There are two career routes you might want to think about if you're interested in dealing with big data and crunching numbers which is either becoming a data analyst or a data scientist. The big question we wish to answer in this article is what distinguishes data scientists from data analysts? 

Who Is A Data Analyst

A data analyst often gathers information to spot trends that aid decision-making by company executives. The main goal of a data analyst is to employ statistical analysis to find solutions to issues and provide answers to queries.  A data analyst makes queries to relational databases using techniques like SQL. A data analyst may also prepare the data by removing useless or irrelevant information and determining how to handle missing data.

A data analyst often manages the process of mining, cleaning, and analyzing the data after determining the organization's goals as part of a multidisciplinary team. The data analyst develops and communicates their findings using communication skills, programming languages like R and SAS, visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau, and other techniques.

Who Is A Data Scientist?

A data scientist may be more focused than a data analyst on creating new tools and techniques to obtain the information a company needs to tackle challenging problems. To comprehend the implications of the data, it is also advantageous to have business intuition and critical-thinking abilities. 

A data scientist is someone who not only understands math and statistics but also has the hacker abilities to solve problems creatively, according to several in the industry. Typically, a data scientist will be more involved in developing data modeling procedures. building predictive models and algorithms External link:open in new. Data scientists might therefore devote more time to creating tools, automation systems, and data frameworks.

Data Analyst Job Description vs Data Scientist Job Description

The duties of a data analyst or data scientist may change based on the sector and place of employment. Finding out how or why something occurred, like why sales decreased, or developing dashboards that support KPIs could be part of a data analyst's day. Data scientists, on the other hand, are more concerned with what will or could happen, employing data modeling approaches and large data frameworks such as Spark.

Data Analyst Job Description

• Data querying using SQL.
• Data analysis and forecasting using Excel.
• Creating dashboards using business intelligence software.
• Performing various types of analytics including descriptive, diagnostic, predictive or prescriptive analytics.

Data Scientist Job Description

• A data scientist may spend up to 60% of their time scrubbing data.
• Data mining using APIs or building ETL pipelines.
• Data cleaning using programming languages (e.g. Python or R).
• Statistical analysis using machine learning algorithms such as natural language processing, logistic regression, kNN, Random Forest or gradient boosting.
• Creating programming and automation techniques, such as libraries, that simplify day-to-day processes using tools like Tensorflow to develop and train machine learning models.
• Developing big data infrastructures using Hadoop and Spark and tools such as Pig and Hive.

How Much do data scientists in Nigerian earn?

A data Scientist in Nigeria typically earns an average of 517,000 NGN per month. Data Scientist salaries in Nigeria range from 248,000 NGN to 811,000 NGN.

How much do data analysts in Nigeria earn?

A data analyst in Nigeria earns an average of 316,000 NGN per month. Data analyst salaries in Nigeria range from 168,000 NGN to 481,000 NGN.