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about it online. You search more about the place and enjoy reading information. And,
you log into Facebook. What do you see? Advertisements of your dream destination
pop up in every corner of the screen. It implies that smart digital assistants track your
search and load you with additional information that might help you make your dream
come true.
That is where Big Data and Data Analytics tools and techniques help unfold the world
of hidden, yet targeted information.
A 2022 prediction says - each user would create 1.7 megabytes of new data every
second. Within a year, there would be 44 trillion gigabytes of data accumulated in the
world. This raw data needs to be analyzed for business decision making, optimizing
business performances, studying customer trends, and delivering better products and
services.
There are many tools to assist this Data-Driven Decision-making process, and choosing
the right tool is a challenge for data scientists or data analysts. Common queries that
could run in your mind are: how many users use tools, how easy it is to learn, how it is
placed in the market, and if you are a business owner, you may be concerned about the
cost of ownership of such tools.
1. Python
2. R
3. SAS
4. Excel
5. Power BI
6. Tableau
7. Apache Spark
1. Python
Python was initially designed as an Object-Oriented Programming language for
software and web development and later enhanced for data science. Python is
the fastest-growing programming languages today.
It is a powerful Data Analysis tool and has a great set of friendly libraries for any
aspect of scientific computing.
Python is free, open-source software, and it is easy to learn.
Python’s data analysis library Pandas was built over NumPy, which is one of the
earliest libraries in Python for data science.
With Pandas, you can just do anything! You can perform advanced data manipulations
and numeric analysis using data frames.
Pandas support multiple file-formats; for example, you can import data from Excel
spreadsheets to processing sets for time-series analysis. (By definition - Time-series
analysis is a statistical technique that analyses time series data, i.e., data collected at a
certain interval of time)
Pandas is a powerful tool for data visualizing, data masking, merging, indexing and
grouping data, data cleaning, and many more.
To know more about Pandas, checkout Python Pandas Tutorials.
Other libraries, such as Scipy, Scikit-learn, StatsModels, are used for statistical
modeling, mathematical algorithms, machine learning, and data mining.
Matplotlib, seaborn, and vispy are packages for data visualization and graphical
analysis
Python has an extensive developer community for support and is the most widely
used language
Top Companies that use Python for data analysis are Spotify, Netflix, NASA,
Google and CERN and many more
2. R
R is the leading programming language for statistical modeling, visualization, and
data analysis. It is majorly used by statisticians for statistical analysis, Big Data
and machine learning.
R is a free, open-source programming language and has a lot of enhancements
to it in the form of user written packages
R has a steep learning curve and needs some amount of working knowledge of
coding. However, it is a great language when it comes to syntax and consistency.
R is a winner when it comes to EDA(By definition - In statistics, exploratory data
analysis(EDA) is an approach to analyzing data sets to summarize their main
characteristics, often with visual methods).
Data manipulation in R is easy with packages such as plyr, dplyr, and tidy.
R is excellent when it comes to data visualization and analysis with packages
such as ggplot, lattice, ggvis, etc.
R has a huge community of developers for support.
R is used by
o Facebook - For behavior analysis related to status updates and profile
pictures.
o Google - For advertising effectiveness and economic forecasting.
o Twitter - For data visualization and semantic clustering
o Uber - For statistical analysis
3. SAS
SAS is a statistical software suite widely used for BI (Business Intelligence), data
management, and predictive analysis.
SAS is proprietary software, and companies need to pay to use it. A free
university edition has been introduced for students to learn and use SAS.
SAS has a simple GUI; hence it is easy to learn; however, a good knowledge of
the SAS programming knowledge is an added advantage to use the tool.
SAS’s DATA step (The data step is where data is created, imported, modified,
merged, or calculated) helps inefficient data handling and manipulation. SAS’s
data analytics process is as shown:
SAS is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, BI, and weather forecasting.
Since SAS is a paid-for service, it has a 24X7 customer support to help with your
doubts.
Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter are a few companies that use SAS.
SAS is used for clinical research reporting in Novartis and Covance, Citibank,
Apple, Deloitte and much more use SAS for predictive analysis
4. Excel
Excel is a spreadsheet and a simple yet powerful tool for data collection and
analysis.
Excel is not free; it is a part of the Microsoft Office “suite” of programs.
Excel does not need a UI to enter data; you can start right away.
It is readily available, widely used and easy to learn and start on data analysis
The Data Analysis Toolpak in Excel offers a variety of options to perform
statistical analysis of your data. The charts and graphs in Excel give a clear
interpretation and visualization of your data, which helps in decision making as
they are easy to understand.
The Analysis Toolpak feature needs to be enabled and configured in Excel, as shown.
Once the Toolpak has been set up, you will see the list of tools. You can choose the tool
based on your goals and the information that you want to analyze.
Excel is used by more than 750 million users across the world.
5. Power BI
6. Tableau
Tableau provides fast analytics; it can explore any type of data – spreadsheets,
databases, data on Hadoop and cloud services
It is easy to use as it has a powerful drag and drop features that anyone with an
intuitive mind can handle.
The data visualization with smart dashboards can be shared within seconds.
Top companies that use Tableau are Amazon, Citibank, Barclays, LinkedIn, and
many more.
7. Apache Spark
Spark Is an integrated analytics engine for Big Data processing designed for
developers, researchers, and data scientists.
It is free, open-source and a wide range of developers contribute to its
development
It is a high-performance tool and works well for batch and streaming data.
Learning Spark is easy, and you can use it interactively from the Scala, Python,
R, and SQL shells too.
Spark can run on any platform such as Hadoop, Apache Mesos, standalone, or
in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources.
Spark includes libraries such as
o for SQL and structured data - SparkSQL
o Machine learning - MLlib
o Live dataStream processing - SparkStreaming
o Graph analytics - GraphX.
Uber, Slack, Shopify, and many other companies use Apache Spark for data
analytics.
Summary
I am sure by now; you would have got a fair understanding of data analytics tools. For
you to move ahead in your data analytics journey and search for the right tool, you need
to invest quite a bit of your time in understanding your and/or your organization’s data
needs, and then scout around analyzing various tools available in the market and then
decide.
Source : https://hackr.io/blog/top-data-analytics-tools