What is the difference between the two? Is there any crossover between them? Can anyone provide any examples of how each of them work? Thanks.
In: Mathematics
Statistics is a mathematical theory based on probability that seeks to evaluate if a claim about data is supported by the data, and to make predictions from this data.
Data analysis is an application of statistics. But it also involves things like data collection, data preparation and filtering, data visualization, and interpretation. These things are not statistics, but needed for work that uses statistics.
Statisticians fall into two branches: those who develop new mathematical theories for statistics, and those who do data analysis. Some people do both.
Non-statisticians also do all sorts of data analysis. Engineers, scientists, doctors, marketing analysts, stock brokers, etc all use data analysis as a core part of their job, even though they may have a different title and are not statisticians.
Generally any data analysis job uses statistics, but statisticians are specially trained to develop and mathematically prove the theories they use, whereas other jobs have a more applied training.
There are also jobs like data science, which tends to focus on building data analysis pipelines into software and websites. So there is often a high emphasis on automation and efficiency.
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