What tools to learn for becoming data scientist?
The software / tools / programming language that you need to learn become data scientist are
- Open source software – These are available completely free online
- a) R programming
- b) Python
- Licensed software – These are available at a price to get the license to use the software
- a) SAS – SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Enterprise miner
- b) IBM – IBM SPSS Statistics, IBM Watson or modeler
- Needless to say that one should have good Excel skills
- Also SQL is the important query language for extracting data from various relational databases.
SAS Enterprise and IBM SPSS Statistics basically offer same functionality. You can do basic statistical analysis in these software tools.
SAS Enterprise miner and IBM Watson or modeler are advanced machine learning tools to build predictive models.
For open source tools, one should be comfortable with programming language. However without programming language as well it is possible to become data scientist. There are various point and click software which doesn’t require programming to become a data scientist. Even IBM Watson and SAS enterprise miner offer point and click option.
The other tool one should learn is data visualization tool.
The licensed tools for data visualization are
- a) Tableau
- b) Qlik view
Similarly, data visualization can be done in R programming and python. SAS also introduced their data visualization which is SAS visual analytics.
To start with learn, learn either R programming or Python and one data visualization tool.