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

Summary

This book covered the basic statistic concepts to use ML models. We can group our data to research the segments that are more important for our activity. Then, we can apply the regression model to these segments and see what the most influential variables are to build predictions using them. Finally, we forecast the values of these important segments and have an idea of what the behavior of our research variables can be in the future.

In this chapter, we applied the three general steps of the ML algorithm by designing a forecast model with known data, testing the model, also with known data, and finally, doing a prediction. As with any other ML function, we need to observe and ensure quality control of the data source to be sure that it is useful to do forecasts. In the case of time series, we know that the Durbin-Watson test checks for data autocorrelation to see whether the past has an influence on the present and whether it can predict the future. Then, we test the model...