There’s not much of a difference between data scientist & business analysts in terms of the acquired skillsets & acumen; however, the application of the acquired skills differs. Data scientists deep dive into the technical side of things focusing on the mathematical & statistical relationship between data, optimal data mining techniques and devising on the best fit model to describe the underlying data.
Business Analyst, on the other hand, focuses on the front-end side of things wherein they are responsible in identifying workable business problems and translate them into statistical business intelligence problems. They are also involved in converting statistical outputs to actionable insights which can be consumed by the business in devising related strategies around it.
From my understanding, data science is collecting the right data and being able to manipulate it in a way to show patterns in graphical form to help teams or companies answer questions. Business analytics is taking those graphs and patterns and creating the insight to both answer key questions & provide action items for improving or continuing those patterns. Business analysts also have to consider the whole picture not just the numbers being dissected. This means they are pulling into their equations budgets, resources, and expenses when even just looking at revenue numbers.
Data scientists like to deal with raw data and sometimes use Excel, R, Python, or another language to do their statistics. They don’t want to learn about the business as a whole or provide the business insights based off the data.