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

Important Measures Derived from Survival

Survival and hazard curves provide nice pictures of customers over time. Pretty pictures are great for conveying information and qualitatively comparing different groups, but survival analysis can also provide quantitative metrics. This section discusses three particular measures: the point estimate of survival, the median customer lifetime, and the average remaining customer lifetime. It ends with a discussion of confidence in the hazard values.

Point Estimate of Survival

The point estimate of survival is the survival value at a particular tenure. It answers the simple question: How many customers do we expect to survive up to a given point in time? This calculation is easy—looking up the survival value at a particular tenure.

The point estimate is sometimes the best measure to use. For instance, many companies invest in customer acquisition, so customers must stay around long enough to recoup this investment. This is true when telephone...