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 11: Testing Data for Time Series Compliance

Predicting values with a time series requires that we have historical data to analyze whether past values have a relationship with present ones and whether this relationship can be useful to predict future values. To validate this, we have to test the autocorrelation of the data. This chapter's purpose is to train professionals responsible for doing purchase planning and inventories, as well as those who need to do forecasts. To do effective planning based on data, we first have to validate that we have a good fit to do this kind of analysis. We need data to contain past values that correlate with present ones to predict future ones. We can create charts to see whether there is predictable behavior in our data and then run a statistical test to confirm that. To do this research, we will be doing the following in this chapter:

  • Visualizing seasonal trends
  • Researching autocorrelation – past values' influence...