Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning with Microsoft Excel 2019

By : Julio Cesar Rodriguez Martino
Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning with Microsoft Excel 2019

By: Julio Cesar Rodriguez Martino

Overview of this book

We have made huge progress in teaching computers to perform difficult tasks, especially those that are repetitive and time-consuming for humans. Excel users, of all levels, can feel left behind by this innovation wave. The truth is that a large amount of the work needed to develop and use a machine learning model can be done in Excel. The book starts by giving a general introduction to machine learning, making every concept clear and understandable. Then, it shows every step of a machine learning project, from data collection, reading from different data sources, developing models, and visualizing the results using Excel features and offerings. In every chapter, there are several examples and hands-on exercises that will show the reader how to combine Excel functions, add-ins, and connections to databases and to cloud services to reach the desired goal: building a full data analysis flow. Different machine learning models are shown, tailored to the type of data to be analyzed. At the end of the book, the reader is presented with some advanced use cases using Automated Machine Learning, and artificial neural network, which simplifies the analysis task and represents the future of machine learning.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Machine Learning Basics
4
Section 2: Data Collection and Preparation
8
Section 3: Analytics and Machine Learning Models
11
Section 4: Data Visualization and Advanced Machine Learning

Forecasting time series automatically in Excel

Now that we have forecast a time series the hard way, understanding every step, we can do it the easy way. We will use Excel's built-in functions to predict the future number of passengers. Perform the following steps:

  1. Select both columns, TravelDate and Passengers, corresponding to the time and number of passengers.
  2. Navigate to Data in the main menu.
  3. Select Forecast Sheet (see the following screenshot for reference):
  1. A window will pop up, showing a preview of the forecast and giving us the chance to change some parameters by clicking in Options:
    • Forecast End: We can choose the end of the forecast period. By default, Excel forecasts three seasons ahead (more on this to follow).
    • Forecast Start: We can do the same with the start of the forecast period. Default is the last point in time of our time series.
    • Confidence interval...