■■ Data Analyst Roadmap
1. Core Fundamentals (Foundation Stage)
Before diving into tools, you need strong basics:
- **Mathematics & Statistics**
- Descriptive stats: mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation
- Probability basics, correlation, hypothesis testing
- Basic linear regression concepts
- **Excel / Google Sheets**
- Data cleaning & formatting
- Formulas & functions (VLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, IF, SUMIFS, etc.)
- Pivot tables & charts
- Dashboards in Excel
---
2. Databases & SQL
- Relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server)
- SQL Queries:
- SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY
- JOINs, GROUP BY, HAVING
- Subqueries, CTEs, Window functions
- Hands-on practice with real datasets
---
3. Programming Basics
- **Python** (preferred) or R
- Python Libraries:
- Pandas (data manipulation)
- NumPy (numerical ops)
- Matplotlib / Seaborn (visualization)
- Writing simple scripts for data cleaning
---
4. Data Visualization & BI Tools
- **Power BI** / **Tableau** (pick at least one)
- Create dashboards, reports, KPIs
- Storytelling with data
- Connecting BI tools to databases
---
5. Data Cleaning & Analysis
- Handling missing values, duplicates, outliers
- Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
- Feature engineering basics
- Understanding business metrics
---
6. Advanced Skills (Optional but Valuable)
- **Statistics in depth**
- A/B Testing
- Regression analysis
- **Big Data Basics**
- SQL with large datasets
- Intro to Spark / Hadoop
- **Cloud**
- Basics of AWS/GCP/Azure for analytics
- **Basic Machine Learning** (for career growth toward Data Scientist)
---
7. Soft Skills & Business Knowledge
- Critical thinking & problem-solving
- Communication & storytelling
- Understanding business KPIs (sales, churn, retention, growth)
- Presenting insights clearly to stakeholders
---
8. Projects & Portfolio
Build **practical projects** to showcase:
- Sales dashboard (Power BI/Tableau)
- Customer segmentation analysis (Python + SQL)
- HR Analytics (Excel + visualization)
- Marketing campaign analysis (A/B testing)
- Real-world datasets from Kaggle
---
9. Career Growth
- Share dashboards/visuals on **GitHub + LinkedIn**
- Take part in Kaggle / data hackathons
- Apply for internships / entry-level analyst roles
- Keep improving with domain-specific data (finance, retail, healthcare, etc.)
---
■ Learning Order
1. Excel →
2. SQL →
3. Python (for data handling) →
4. Visualization (Power BI/Tableau) →
5. Data Cleaning & EDA →
6. Projects →
7. Business + Communication →
8. Job/Internship
■ Data Science Roadmap
1. Fundamentals (Foundation Stage)
Before diving deep, you need strong fundamentals:
- **Mathematics & Statistics**
- Linear Algebra (vectors, matrices, transformations)
- Probability & Statistics (mean, variance, distribution, Bayes theorem, hypothesis testing)
- Calculus (derivatives, gradients, optimization concepts)
- **Programming**
- Python (most used) or R
- Data types, loops, functions, OOP, libraries
- Important Python Libraries:
- NumPy → numerical computing
- Pandas → data manipulation
- Matplotlib / Seaborn → visualization
- **Databases & SQL**
- Basics of SQL (SELECT, JOIN, GROUP BY, ORDER BY)
- NoSQL (MongoDB basics for unstructured data)
---
2. Data Handling & Visualization
- Data Cleaning & Preprocessing
- Handling missing values, duplicates, outliers
- Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
- Data Visualization: matplotlib, seaborn, plotly
---
3. Core Machine Learning
- **Supervised Learning**
- Regression (Linear, Logistic)
- Classification (Decision Trees, Random Forests, SVM, k-NN, Naive Bayes)
- **Unsupervised Learning**
- Clustering (K-Means, DBSCAN, Hierarchical)
- Dimensionality Reduction (PCA, t-SNE)
- **Model Evaluation**
- Train-test split, cross-validation
- Metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, F1, ROC-AUC
- **Feature Engineering**
- Encoding categorical variables
- Scaling, normalization, transformations
---
4. Advanced Topics
- **Deep Learning**
- Neural Networks basics
- TensorFlow / PyTorch
- CNN (for images), RNN/LSTM (for time series & text), Transformers
- **Natural Language Processing (NLP)**
- Text preprocessing (tokenization, stemming, lemmatization)
- Word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe, BERT)
- **Big Data Tools**
- Hadoop, Spark, Kafka
- Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
---
5. Real-World Skills
- **Data Engineering Basics**
- ETL pipelines
- Airflow, Apache Spark
- APIs, Web scraping
- **Model Deployment**
- Flask/FastAPI for ML models
- Docker, Kubernetes
- MLOps (CI/CD for ML)
- **Version Control**
- Git & GitHub
---
6. Soft Skills & Domain Knowledge
- Communication (present insights clearly)
- Business/domain knowledge (finance, healthcare, retail, etc.)
- Storytelling with data
---
7. Projects & Portfolio
Build practical projects to showcase:
- Predictive modeling (e.g., house price prediction)
- Sentiment analysis (Twitter reviews)
- Image classification (cats vs dogs)
- Recommendation systems
- Real-time dashboards
---
8. Career Growth
- Participate in Kaggle competitions
- Contribute to open-source projects
- Internships / Freelance work
- Keep up with research papers
---
■ Learning Path (Step Order)
1. Python + Math + SQL →
2. Data Analysis + Visualization →
3. Machine Learning →
4. Deep Learning / NLP / Big Data →
5. Deployment + MLOps →
6. Projects + Portfolio →
7. Job/Internship
