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 supervised learning with decision trees

The decision tree algorithm uses a tree-like model of decisions. Its name is derived from the graphical representation of the cascading process that partitions the records. The algorithm chooses the input variables that better split the dataset into subsets that are more pure in terms of the target variable, ideally a subset that contains only one value of this variable. Decision trees are some of the most widely used and easy to understand classification algorithms.

The outcome of the tree algorithm calculation is a set of simple rules that explain which values or intervals of the input values split the original data better. The fact that the results and the path followed to get to them can be clearly shown gives decision trees an advantage over other algorithms. Explainability is a serious problem for some machine learning...