  As large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their powerful capabilities
in plenty of domains and tasks, including context understanding, code
generation, language generation, data storytelling, etc., many data analysts
may raise concerns if their jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence
(AI). This controversial topic has drawn great attention in public. However, we
are still at a stage of divergent opinions without any definitive conclusion.
Motivated by this, we raise the research question of "is GPT-4 a good data
analyst?" in this work and aim to answer it by conducting head-to-head
comparative studies. In detail, we regard GPT-4 as a data analyst to perform
end-to-end data analysis with databases from a wide range of domains. We
propose a framework to tackle the problems by carefully designing the prompts
for GPT-4 to conduct experiments. We also design several task-specific
evaluation metrics to systematically compare the performance between several
professional human data analysts and GPT-4. Experimental results show that
GPT-4 can achieve comparable performance to humans. We also provide in-depth
discussions about our results to shed light on further studies before reaching
the conclusion that GPT-4 can replace data analysts.
