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

Answers

Here are the answers to the preceding questions:

  1. No. We need to do a visual inspection of the data to guess the possible number of groups for the data. Then, we run the K-means elbow function to get the optimal number of groups of the data.
  2. We choose the number where the curve starts to flatten.
  3. The following are the parameters to execute the K-means function:
    • Number of groups to process
    • The range of the input data
    • The range to put the results returned by the K-means function
  4. Use a pivot table and chart analysis with the minimum, maximum, and centroid values for each group. If the maximum and minimum values have a large distance from the average (centroid), that means that the group has scattered values.
  5. Scattered values with a large distance from the centroid are possible outliers that need further research. One approach could be to do another K-means process for this group to create subgroups to improve the data classification.