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

Producing the forecast – season and trend line

Now, we are ready to make the forecast. We are going to multiply the season component by the trend (regression) line to make a prediction for the following years. The concept behind this calculation is that every period of time (in this case, quarters) has an upper or lower inclination given by the seasonal component. The seasonal component moves up or down the trend line, depending on the predictive behavior for this lapse (we're using quarters in this example). The forecast for Year 6 and Year 7 is shown in Figure 12.6:

Figure 12.9 – Our forecast for years 6 and 7

A forecast is just an approximation of what could happen in the future based on past data. Visualize the sales by quarter for the 5 years of data we have, and note that the sales increase after the third quarter every year, despite sales suffering significant drops in Year 3 and Year 4. This performance is reflected by the forecast...