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

Using Survival for Customer Value Calculations

The customer value calculation is theoretically quite simple. The value of a customer is the product of the estimated future revenue per unit time and the estimated future duration of the customer relationship. This just has one little challenge: knowing the future. We can make informed guesses using historical data.

How far in the future? One possibility is “forever”; however, a finite amount of time—typically, one, two, or five years—is usually sufficient. The future revenue stream is a guesstimation process. Typically, the goal is to understand customers, not a full financial profitability model, with all the checks and balances of corporate accounting.

The choice of revenue instead of profit or net revenue is intentional. In general, customers have some control over their revenue flow because revenue is related to product usage patterns. Plus, because customers are actually paying the money, they pay much more...