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

Showing basic comparisons and relationships between variables

Data visualization is extremely important in the context of data analytics and machine learning. Some of the reasons for this are as follows:

  • Tell the story of your data and help decision makers with their job.
  • Predict the future evolution of some variable(s).
  • Find hidden trends and patterns in the data.
  • Find outliers, that is, anomalies in the data.
  • Understand the distribution, composition, and relationships.
  • Build groups and categories.

We will show different types of charts used to show different types of data. The data used in the example charts is as follows:

Year Sales Cost Profit ROI
2015 23455 18294.9 5160.1 28.21%
2016 19226 12881.42 6344.58 49.25%
2017 34557 24881.04 9675.96 38.89%
2018 20134 14697.82 5436.18 36.99%
2019 22314 14057.82 8256.18 58.73%

Also consider the following data:

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