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

Chapter 10, Azure and Excel - Machine Learning in the Cloud

  1. Cost, speed, global scale, productivity, performance, and security.
  2. Cloud computing is useful for many different applications and, in fact, can replace everything that was built on-premise, from databases to visualizations.
  3. Web services are applications hosted on the internet, which can communicate with other applications through predefined protocols and data formats. The advantage of using web services is that they are easy to share and are independent from the operating system and programming language used.
  4. Azure Machine Learning Studio needs the input data format, and this is taken from the input data module.
  5. The training flow is used to train the model and then save it. The same model is then used in a separate flow for prediction, without the need to retrain the model every time it is used.
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