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 4: Introduction to Data Grouping

Data grouping is a machine learning application to segment large amounts of data into assigned groups for data points with similar behavior. It is necessary to use the K-means machine learning algorithm because it is very difficult to visualize a large amount of data on a business intelligence chart. Furthermore, when the number of variables is greater than four, we can't make a chart.

The best-case scenario for groups is compact data with a small standard deviation. If we have groups with a large standard deviation, it could mean that they are outliers. Outliers have different behaviors compared with the other groups and could indicate possible suspicious activity such as fraud or poor system performance, which could affect the entire operation in the near future.

The K-means algorithm is the best known of the grouping methods. There are others that could be better than K-means depending on the data. Four examples of classification...