Book Image

Data Forecasting and Segmentation Using Microsoft Excel

By : Fernando Roque
Book Image

Data Forecasting and Segmentation Using Microsoft Excel

By: Fernando Roque

Overview of this book

Data Forecasting and Segmentation Using Microsoft Excel guides you through basic statistics to test whether your data can be used to perform regression predictions and time series forecasts. The exercises covered in this book use real-life data from Kaggle, such as demand for seasonal air tickets and credit card fraud detection. You’ll learn how to apply the grouping K-means algorithm, which helps you find segments of your data that are impossible to see with other analyses, such as business intelligence (BI) and pivot analysis. By analyzing groups returned by K-means, you’ll be able to detect outliers that could indicate possible fraud or a bad function in network packets. By the end of this Microsoft Excel book, you’ll be able to use the classification algorithm to group data with different variables. You’ll also be able to train linear and time series models to perform predictions and forecasts based on past data.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1 – An Introduction to Machine Learning Functions
5
Part 2 – Grouping Data to Find Segments and Outliers
10
Part 3 – Simple and Multiple Linear Regression Analysis
14
Part 4 – Predicting Values with Time Series

Chapter 9: Building, Training, and Validating a Linear Model

In the last chapter, we learned about statistical data tests to validate whether it is useful to build a predictive model. It depends on the strong relationship between the predictor variable, X, and the result variable, Y.

In this chapter, we will develop a prediction model to see whether the amount of fuel in miles per gallon is affected by motor horsepower. We will understand how to measure the difference between the expected values from the data source and the response given by the model.

The strong or weak relationship between the expected values and the linear regression is based on the difference between the training data and the regression model. We can use several tests to check whether the predictor variable and the result variable have a link. These statistical tests can be as follows:

  • The coefficients of determination and correlation
  • t-statistics
  • The p-value
  • f-statistics

t-statistics...