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

Learning by example – Customer Cohort Analysis

An excellent way of gaining insights about a company's customers and their behavior is to perform a segmented analysis. These segments are groups of customers that share the same characteristics and are usually called cohorts. Their definition depends very much on the type of business we are dealing with.

The dataset we will analyze contains a list of customer IDs, the date when they first purchased something from us, the day they left us, and the mean amount of money spent per month. What does "left us" mean in this context? It is mainly a matter of definition. For example, if we refer to a credit card, we could consider that the customer left when they cancelled the card, or maybe we want to go further and say that if the customer did not spend any money for two or three months, we consider that they have left...