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

Understanding time series data

The objective of a time series machine learning algorithm is to forecast values and effectively plan the use of resources, such as inventories, seasonal-demand equipment allocation, and agriculture production, for example.

As a regression model needs a statistically significant relationship between the variables, a time series model needs autocorrelated data to be useful for a predictive model. In the following figure, we can see that the regression model variables' relationship is tested by statistical methods such as f-statistics and p-value:

Figure 3.1 – A: Linear regression and B: Air passenger time series

Figure 3.1 shows the prediction model for four trimesters of years 11 and 12 from air passenger time series data from the past 10 years. To build a useful predictive model, the air passenger data from years 1 to 10 needs to autocorrelate. This means that each value is dependent on prior data. Looking at the...