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

Understanding the backpropagation algorithm

There are two phases in the training process of a deep neural network: forward and back propagation. We have seen the forward phase in detail:

  1. Calculate the weighted sum of the inputs:
  1. Apply the activation function to the result:
Find different activation functions in the suggested reading at the end of the chapter. The sigmoid function is the most common and is easier to use, but not the only one.
  1. Calculate the output by adding all the results from the last layer (N neurons):

After the forward phase, we calculate the error as the difference between the output and the known target value: Error = (Output-y)2.

All weights are assigned random values at the beginning of the forward phase.

The output, and therefore the error, are functions of the weights wi and θi. This means that we could go backward from the error and see...