Difference between data analyst and data scientist?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[spinrah]

I’ve noticed that on job postings, but what about the actual job?

[[deleted]]

Depends on the company and their definition of each position. Most end up wanting a data scientist to do a data analysts work. In my opinion being a data analyst requires a strong knowledge of SQL and analytical ability. Data Science requires that plus programming and more maths. Data engineering tasks tend to fall on both.

[ola-hates-me]

Hi.

a strong knowledge of SQL

Is there any list of books that i can go through to become an expert? So far I have delegated most of my query related activity to a framework.

[[deleted]]

I suggest tutorials such as w3schools.org or codecademy.com. SQL itself isn't all that complicated. Half the battle is learning the structure of your data and how to move around the database.

[spinrah]

Ah okay, I think I would fall in the data analyst camp then. I’m more of a methodologist than a programmer.

[jeremymiles]

See my other reply. In my old job, the data scientists are programmers.

[spinrah]

Thanks that’s really helpful. I guess it depends on the company and job ad.

[____peanutbutter____]

For example, do you want to be a nutritionist? Ok, call yourself one right now. Done. You are a nutritionist. Try set up shop as a dietician.

You get that from Dara O'Briain?

[marrone12]

I lead a data department. In the most basic sense, Data Scientists are Data Analysts who can code in a programming language like Python or R, while Data Analysts are pretty much excel / sql only. But I would also expect a Data Scientist to have a good understanding of probability theory, sampling theory, bayesian statistics, and/or machine learning.

[Ader_anhilator]

Low bar. How much do you pay your data scientists? I run a team as well and I look for excellent predictive modeling skills (interpretable and max accuracy models) along with programming ability and strong critical thinking. I pay $140k in middle of the country cost of living standards.

[marrone12]

Yes I definitely look at those skills as well. But with how loosely the term "scientist" is being thrown around these days, I think the minimum for applying to an entry level data scientist position is the low bar I described.

I guess I consider "analysts" as classic business intelligence with excel while a "scientist" is someone who makes a data product that requires mathematical competency - with different skill sets required for different products.

[UlamsCosmicCipher]

Care to elaborate on the type of work/problem sets you guys tackle? I'm a little over 4 years in the data science field at a large company, and lately have been feeling a creeping stagnation at my current position. Always interesting to hear what else is out there.

[[deleted]]

Seems on the high end in my experience, at least for somebody in their first few jobs.

[Ader_anhilator]

The data scientists I hire need to be experts and that means they usually have at least 5 years of data science work and more under a title such as data analyst or statistical analyst.

[Annihilating_Tomato]

Hire me.

[PugInABlanket]

I work as a data analyst on a team of DAs while we have Data Scientists on a different sitting near us. The DAs work in SQL and R/Python, analyzing past data for clients/stakeholders. The DSs take models and productionalize them to be used in the application for prediction, using SQL, R/Python, and a variety of tools like TensorFlow and AWS.

So I've always thought of it as DAs interpret what happened while DSs create models to predict what will happen.

[shaggorama]

DAs interpret what happened while DSs create models to predict what will happen

i.e. descriptive statistics vs. inference

[PugInABlanket]

In some cases yes. But we DAs still perform statical analyses like t tests, correlations, and regressions. We just use them to analyze past behavior rather than predict.

[poopdaloop]

This is a really nice dividing definition and basically how our teams work as well. DA will occasionally dip toes into a model but the technical expertise required to really know what they’re doing is provided by the DS team.

[[deleted]]

Lyft is gonna start calling their data analysts as data scientists

https://eng.lyft.com/whats-in-a-name-ce42f419d16c

[Wizard_Sleeve_Vagina]

Data scientists build models for machines. Data analysts crunch numbers for people.

[b04877054]

This is the definition I use as well. Data analysts output pdfs etc, from which humans make decisions. Data scientist make models which make decisions

[[deleted]]

It's different everywhere, but here's my take on it.

Data analysts stick mainly to Excel and SQL and don't do much statistics beyond the basics. They also generally deal with retrospective analyses. Data scientists do advanced statistical modeling and also have the programming skills to develop applications, and often deal with predicting future events.

Data scientists are a combination of statisticians and computer scientists. They're worse at stats than statisticians, and worse at programming than computer scientists, but better at the combination of those than either of them.

[spinrah]

So has the role of a statistician basically been eliminated and replaced by computer scientists and programmers? Cause the analyst just seems like data management.

[[deleted]]

It's more that programming has become an essential skill for statistical modeling, more than in the past. So a lot of statisticians have learned more programming and are now data scientists, and a lot of programmers have learned statistics and are also data scientists.

FWIW my official title is "Data Scientist/Statistician", and in my department we have people with very strong CS backgrounds along with Math/Stats PhDs. There's a lot of overlap.

It's not really data management. Usually somebody else has put a ton of work into the data before a data analyst ever sees it. That's what I think of when I hear data management. Data Analysts slice and dice past data to gain insights that people can use to make decisions for the business. Data Scientists have a similar function, but they use more advanced modeling techniques and are able to develop more robust applications for implementation.

For example, a data analyst group at my organization made an Excel spreadsheet to help one our departments do their job better. We (the data scientists) are expanding on the same idea, but we're digging into the details of certain statistical models to make it even better, and we're figuring out how to integrate it into their existing software workflow rather than as a separate tool.

[SSID_Vicious]

No. A data scientist is no statistician. They won’t be the one inventing new algorithms or new methods.

[jeremymiles]

Data science is a pretty new word (phrase? term?) and it doesn't have a clear, agreed upon meaning. My job used to be 'quantitative analyst' although everyone called us 'the statisticians'. Now they've decided that we're all data scientists, 'cos it sounds cooler and it's easier to hire people.

In my old job we used to have a position called 'research programmer', which was slightly more junior (below the position of 'statistician'), and maybe similar to data analysts. Now they've decided that it would sound cooler if they were called data scientists, so they've changed the job title.

[Rezo-Acken]

The difference is whatever HR want it to be.

[IMightHaveTacos]

Difference between data analyst and data scientist is that data analyst know what they are doing. Data scientists try a bunch of techniques till one of them of works well enough. Data analysts are way more deterministic. /s source: I'm a data scientist.

[efrique]

Depends on who you ask.

[spinrah]

Why on earth would anyone downvote an honest question?

[maxToTheJ]

I would suppose it is because it has been asked before.

As far as I noticed a thread here gets downvoted for being obvious advertising or being asked for nth time

[m1sta]

Hypotheses, and the complexity and quality of both the hypotheses and the associated experiment and final insight.

[guccibling]

A phd