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

Researching autocorrelation – past values' influence over present values

In this section, we will learn how to get data errors or residuals from the linear regression model that we want to use as a time-series model to do forecasts. The regression line indicates the trend of data. The Durbin-Watson test uses the errors to see whether there is periodic behavior in the time frame in order to decide whether there is autocorrelation or not.

First, we are going to use the regression function in Excel with the air passenger sales data, as shown in Figure 11.5. We have to enter the parameters in the regression function and specify that we want error results. To do this, go to the Data option in the Data Analysis upper menu and choose Regression.

If you cannot find the Regression option in Data Analysis, you will have to install the Analysis tool pack in Excel. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Click the File tab, and then go to the Options | Add-ins category.
  2. In...