Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modelling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making.

A data analyst collects, cleans, and interprets data sets in order to answer a question or solve a problem. They can work in many industries, including business, finance, criminal justice, science, medicine, and government.

Data analyst tasks and responsibilities

A data analyst is a person whose job is to gather and interpret data in order to solve a specific problem. The role includes plenty of time spent with data, but entails communicating findings too.

Here’s what many data analysts do on a day-to-day basis:

Gather data: Analysts often collect data themselves. This could include conducting surveys, tracking visitor characteristics on a company website, or buying datasets from data collection specialists.

Clean data: Raw data might contain duplicates, errors, or outliers. Cleaning the data means maintaining the quality of data in a spreadsheet or through a programming language so that your interpretations won’t be wrong or skewed.

Model data: This entails creating and designing the structures of a database. You might choose what types of data to store and collect, establish how data categories are related to each other, and work through how the data actually appears.

Interpret data: Interpreting data will involve finding patterns or trends in data that will help you answer the question at hand.

Present: Communicating the results of your findings will be a key part of your job. You do this by putting together visualizations like charts and graphs, writing reports, and presenting information to interested parties.