Why data analysis?
In a retail store, There are perishable items with an expiry date and usually these are getting expired before they are sold. This would be a huge loss to the company. What to do to minimize the loss?
The first part is to take a look at the available data.
The products can be categorized into for example in beverages, toiletries, food products and so on. (Note: this is just a rough classification)
After further classification these products will eventually form a tree.
The data comprised of items sold on each day of the year, number of customers on each day, peak hours of the store, products sold during the various hour zones (for example into early morning, morning, noon, early evening, evening, night and late night) and a bunch of other information. Now based on all these data points, we can figure out that which products and category of products are selling at what time of the day and so on.
Similarly it can be broadly categorized on a yearly basis; to figure out the demand of products during different seasons. And it can be determined that which products move less or not moving at all from the shelf.
This is: Data Analysis.....
In simple terms, finding meaningful data to arrive at a savvy decision is the most important function of data analysis.
There are various tools which can help in the analysis. Tableau, Excel, and PowerBI are some tools which can give pictorial reports.
IBM Cognos Analysis Studio is the component of IBM Cognos Analytics that can be used for multidimensional analysis and exploration of large data sources.
Python is a language which has a lot of inbuilt support for analysis. A lot of algorithms and classification methods have inbuilt functions in Python. So you need to just call the functions by passing the right parameters.
There are many courses in Edx and coursera which talk about basic analysis. You can take up a course and work your way up by practicing on your own. A lot of data sets are available for free online. You can make use of them.
Good Luck!
Reference: (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/What-is-data-analysis-1/answer/Aishwarya-Murali-16