Book Image

Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel - Second Edition

By : Gordon S. S. Linoff
Book Image

Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel - Second Edition

By: Gordon S. S. Linoff

Overview of this book

Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel, 2nd Edition shows you how to leverage the two most popular tools for data query and analysis—SQL and Excel—to perform sophisticated data analysis without the need for complex and expensive data mining tools. Written by a leading expert on business data mining, this book shows you how to extract useful business information from relational databases. You'll learn the fundamental techniques before moving into the "where" and "why" of each analysis, and then learn how to design and perform these analyses using SQL and Excel. Examples include SQL and Excel code, and the appendix shows how non-standard constructs are implemented in other major databases, including Oracle and IBM DB2/UDB. The companion website includes datasets and Excel spreadsheets, and the book provides hints, warnings, and technical asides to help you every step of the way. Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel, 2nd Edition shows you how to perform a wide range of sophisticated analyses using these simple tools, sparing you the significant expense of proprietary data mining tools like SAS.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Foreword
17
EULA

Extracting Features

Sometimes, the most interesting features are the descriptions of products and channels, markets and retailers. These descriptions include more complex data types, such as text and geographic position. This section discusses some ideas about extracting information for geographic and character data types.

Geographic Location Information

Geographic location information is represented as latitudes and longitudes, and perhaps as geographic hierarchies. When mapped, this information is quite interesting. However, maps do not fit well into customer signatures nor are they well-suited for most statistical and data mining algorithms.

Longitudes and latitudes are generated by geocoding addresses or by reading positioning information on a mobile device. The most obvious address is the customer address. However, there are addresses for retailers, and ATM machines, and mobile phones, and city centers, and Internet service provider points-of-presence, and so on. Such geocoding...