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

CHAPTER 6
How Long Will Customers Last? Survival Analysis to Understand Customers and Their Value

How long will a lightbulb last? Which factors influence a cancer patient’s prognosis? What is the average time to failure (MTTF) of a disk drive? These questions may seem to have little relationship to each other, but they do have one thing in common: They all involve estimating time to an event, so they can be answered using survival analysis. And, these ideas apply to customers, their tenures, and their value.

The scientific and industrial origins of survival analysis explain the terminology. Its emphasis on “failure” and “risk” and “mortality” and “recidivism” may explain why, once upon a time, survival analysis did not readily catch on in the business and marketing world. That time has passed, and survival analysis is recognized as a powerful set of analytic techniques for understanding customers. And, the combination of...