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

Grouping with the K-means machine learning function

We need a machine learning classification algorithm because classifying a large amount of data is very difficult using traditional business intelligence tools such as pivot tables and charts. We will review and analyze two cases of a large amount of data:

  • Sales in multiple countries and regions
  • Absentees in the office due to different diseases in human resources

We'll inquire about the results of grouping this data with the classification and grouping algorithm, K-means. Then, we will look at the basic concepts of grouping for single- and multiple-variable classifications. This knowledge is important because we will apply these terms to calculate the groups using the Excel add-in K-means function in the next chapter.

As it is difficult to classify large amounts of data, the following segregations are used:

  • Revenue per country
  • Absent hours per disease and month

The challenges of doing...