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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about two data mining techniques: Market Basket Analysis and Customer Cohort Analysis. The first one tells us about hidden relations between store departments or products based on the customers' behavior. The second shows the time evolution of the number of customers, revealing differences between different customer segments or cohorts.

There are a large number of data mining analyses that can help us dig into our datasets and find hidden information, which is extremely important in order for us to understand our business and make the right decisions.

In the next chapter, we will study a special kind of dataset in detail: time series. We will see that it needs a different kind of modeling and analysis.