I am trying to create a forecast using a monthly timeseries data set of marketing expenses for a fictional company. The data looks something like this:
Using linear regression to forecast future sales, I get the following result:
My problem lies with the seasonality of the marketing expenses (higher in the summer months for instance). I would ideally like to calculate to forecasted values of future months including seasonality. I read somewhere about ARIMA forecasting, but am really searching for some best ideas on how to accomplish the task.
To be clear, I do not JUST want a chart and trendline, but the data to support it too.
Any help would be much appreciated!
You can do that easily using Excel (2016) Forecast tool by first selecting your data, then clicking on:
Data -> Forecast Sheet -> Options -> Set Manually (under Seasonality)
You can also play with the options. Once you click on "Create", Excel will generate a graph, and a table with relevant data.
Alternatively, you can also create a binary variable for each season, and calculate a multiple regression for the Marketing expenses controlling for time, and each of the binary variables for the seasons but one (which is the reference group). You could either use excel analytical tool, or any other statistical software.
Related
The problem statement that I am currently working on has data available for 27 customers and the purchase amount they have transacted on (in total) for each month in 2021 from Jan until Sept. The data looks like the attached image with this question/post.
sample dataset
I could simply use average to find the next value but that'd not be precise to a very good extent, but then, in absence of any other data or features/columns, is that the only way to solve this question, or are there any other methods anyone can suggest? Note, both Excel &/or Python examples are fine.
Additional Note: I have already tried FORECAST functions in Excel, but I am not sure if the outcome is correct or not, since Microsoft documentation merely provides the formula by means of which this function performs the calculations. Overall there are 5 total types of FORECAST(.**) functions that Excel provides, but the documentation is poor, hence tomorrow, if I want to write the same solution in Python or any other programming language.
Taking a cursory glance at the data, there's a complexity that I'm missing like seasonality, trend, noise, outliers, etc., but let's just assume that this data is a simple trend line for each client.
From a purely high-level, excel can do a simple FORECAST.ETS(target_date, values, timeline, [seasonality], [data_completion], [aggregation]) formula.
It can be streamlined with excel's built in data tool Forecast Sheet.
I could talk about Python but that's a little more hands on with a time series forecast.
I have a report that is generated weekly with productivity numbers for employees in Excel. I am wanting to create a bell curve for several data points where the viewer can select the week time range and the bell curve will be updated. I have figured out formula wise how to make the mean, standard deviation, norm.dist, etc update when the date range is updated. The issue I have yet to solve or find an answer to though is how to graph this data without having to manually update the ranges of the graphs. Once this is accomplished I'd also like to be able to add vertical lines for the average and 1 standard deviation on either side of the average. Is this a possibility in Excel or any other program? I was hoping to be able to use Excel, but am happy to explore other options if that's the only way to do it. Thanks!
I was trying to plot some reports for Covid-19 cases around the Globe, using Excel and Power BI. With Power BI is easier and fancier to do definitely, but I need an Excel file or calculation that makes sense - similar to the PBI. What I actually wanted is to calculate the daily increase in new cases (with %) and also death rate but per day, or total death by day and so on..
I did some calculations (% of column total and I calculated one field to get death rate%) here using Pivot tables but not sure how to do daily increase/decrease? Did anyone get an idea for additional calculations?
This is copied from PBI (calculations) which I wanna have similar in Excel - but I am not sure If I can calculate it properly (last 2 pictures).
The data source from the input data is here:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/COVID-19-geographic-disbtribution-worldwide.xlsx
You need an extra column for the result you want (e.g. daily increase/decrease), then you can plot either the waterfall chart, or using techniques similar to
https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/5945-excel-chart-display-percentage-change.html
I have been downloading and organizing hourly water quality data into Excel for many different states, and have organized them by year. I have done data prep for them to make sure there are no zeros/every day of the year (DOY) has 24 values, but the time series plots were too noisy so want me to get the daily average values instead.
All of the sites annual data is different in terms of how many days are available, and sometimes they are missing whole months due to no recordings.
So my question is, how can I develop a code to give me the average daily value linked to a specific DOY that I can apply to many different Excel sheets. The data appears like this:
And the files are saved like like CA1_2012 (California Site 1 hourly data from 2012)
I know there is a lot on this topic but I have been trying everything and I can't get a code that works!
You can get the summation of the second column based on values in the first column in matlab using accumarray;
[m,~,n] = unique(data(:,1));
sumdata = [m, accumarray(n,data(:,2))];
for mean I would suggest grpstats:
avgdata = grpstats(data, DOY, {'mean'});
or as #gnovice suggested:
avgdata = accumarray(DOY, data, [], #mean);
You can also get what you want by using Pivot Table in excel and group data by DOY and get the mean value for them in the table. (No coding required).
Morning guys,
I'm hoping that one (or more) of you can help me.
I have been tasked with creating a dashboard which needs to display trends and have a dynamic frontsheet, preferably with drop-down or data forms so as to update a chart / graph.
The information itself is incredibly limited - the scope of the document is tracking a value (0-4) assigned to a staff member's ability to fulfill a task, e.g. 'Quotes - 4', 'Cancellation - 2' and so on. So the metrics are limited to:
Month (a worksheet for each month of the year and one front for the dashboard)
Team (Presently 6 teams, but this is likely to increase over time, so hopefully the solution facilitates relatively easy incorporation of new teams)
Employee (Self explanatory)
Task (Presently 25, but as above - subject to change)
Score (the 0-4 value referred to above)
So as you can see, it's a very simple dataset. The sheets are presently set out with six grids with data validation lists for determining Team and Score (dropdowns for easy data input), with the Task being pre-written and the employee entered manually by the user.
What I'm hoping to do is have a frontsheet with dynamic tables that update accordingly when a dropdown and/or data form is changed. The key focus is on getting the staff members up to 4s for all tasks, so ultimately, the charts will display trends for the individual teams (one chart for each team - 6 charts) on a month-on-month basis and also a dynamic table which can reflect specific information (e.g. employee performance on a specific month, or number of '3s' achieved by a specific team to date).
I've read a reasonable amount on this, but seem to have overwhelmed myself with the sheer amount of options. However, the options can be narrowed given that I'm working on a large corporate network that doesn't really facilitate downloads (so add-ins or anything extraneous to Excel 2007 'out-the-box' isn't an option) and preferably without the use of VBA (1. I'm quite a novice insofar as VBA, 2. Easy distribution and maintainence of the document might be marred by VBA?), though I appreciate that my requirements may dictate VBA to be essential.
Does anyone have any suggestions around how best to proceed creation of this dashboard?
Any and all help is appreciated and I apologise as a newbie if I've contravened any conventions around forum etiquette.
Thank you all for your time,
Rob
There are a couple of things that you need to consider in a task such as this:
a) what sort of output do you require?
b) how are you going to manage the data?
For a) I'd separate it further into the basics of what's required (time series charts of employee and/or team performances [how will team performance be measured? average, % achieving 4, or ?]) and then the bells and whistles of drop-downs. Focus on the basics, the other stuff first the whizzy stuff can come later. Getting b) right is vital - you are going to be extracting subsets of the data to build the charts you want to display. Get b) wrong and you'll just create a horrible task for yourself.
In your position I would consider re-organising the data into the form of a table. Excel's help defines what is meant by a table, but in essence it is a list of your observations where each observation simply comprises the score for a particular month/team/employee/task combination (so each observation comprises 5 values). The observations are arranged as successive rows of the table with the first row being the header row which will contain suitable labels such as "Month", "Team", "Employee", "Task", "Score". The real advantage of using a table such as this is that Excel provides a heap of in-built facilities for manipulating them - look up the help for Sort and Filter on the Data tab. In your case there is an even more compelling reason for using a table - you can use the Pivot Table and Pivot Chart facilities for analysing and displaying the data. If you have not used these before some time and effort spent learning about them will pay dividends. Once your data is organised and you know how to use Pivot Tables and Charts you should be able to prototype sum output very quickly.
If you do decide to organise your data as a table you can still keep a nice friendly looking grid of 6 team "tables" (different from Excel's use of the word) as a data entry facility to enter each month's scores by employee and task. You will need to find a way of getting each month's data from the data entry "tables" to the main data table. (Easiest way would be to use a bit of spare worksheet under the data entry tables to reproduce the entered data as a series of observation rows and then use Paste Special Values to append these rows to the end of the main table of observations. You can use VBA to automate the copy/paste operation if you want, you just need to figure out a way of identifying how may observations are currently in the main table and precisely where you want the paste to end up - COUNT() or COUNTA() is a useful friend here). Main problem to avoid (whether automated or not) is to avoid appending same entered data more than once to main data table.
Have a look at http://www.mediafire.com/download/x64swkp689k10a1/DataEntrytoTable.xlsx for a simple example of some of the above thoughts