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I'm a freshman at a technology university and I want to be a Data Analyst. What major I should choose to learn: Computer Science or Science in Information Systems? And what skills do I need to equip to be a good Data Analyst?

Group of topics: Artificial Intelligent, Domain-driven Data Mining, Predictive Analytics or the other: Software Project Management, Distributed Database, which one is more related to Data analysis?

I'm quite puzzled and worried so I hope that professionals may give me some advice. Please help me!!!

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    $\begingroup$ It depends what is the content in the two majors, this depends a lot on the institution. Check the content, you're looking for topics such as statistics, machine learning, data processing, etc. In general for data science one needs: (1) a solid basic math background, especially in statistics and linear algebra. (2) programming skills, and preferably decent background in computer science. The rest is mostly experience. $\endgroup$
    – Erwan
    Commented Sep 12, 2021 at 12:10
  • $\begingroup$ Group of topics:Artificial Intelligent, Domain-driven Data Mining, Predictive Analytics or the other: Software Project Management, Distributed Database, which one is more related to Data analysis? $\endgroup$
    – nanaboo
    Commented Sep 12, 2021 at 13:25

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Data Science and Data Analysis are 2 different things (though closely related). A Data Scientist can do all the things that a Data Analyst can do but a Data Analyst cannot do all the things a Data Scientist can do. Just to give a flavor, a data scientist deals with data acquiring, data analysis, Machine Learning model creation and model deployment (although this might differ from company to company). Areas covered are Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP and much more.

But a Data Analyst deals with business intelligence tools and data to analyze the data and improve the business. 99.99% of the time Data Analyst does not have to create and deploy Machine Learning models.

Knowledge topics required for a Data Scientist are (roughly) Math, Statistics, Computer vision, Data Structures and Algorithms and Domain Knowledge.

For a Data Analyst (roughly), Domain Knowledge, expertise in Business Intelligence tools (think Excel, PowerBI etc) and Business strategies.

So it depends what field you want to opt for. If you go for Data Science, make sure you have the above skills/knowledge and the same goes for Data analyst.

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