You have data (of course, you do) and you have data that have something missing (of course, you do). The question is multi-fold around that…do we ignore the data, do we remove them from your analysis, or do we interpolate to fill in the missing data? And if so, what type of interpolation is best? […]
Tag: datascience
Be the right kind of ‘Mean’
No, I’m not talking about stingy, spiteful kind…rather mathematical mean: arithmetic and statistical means to be exact. In fact, a handful of mean functions and applications. In most common situations, when we say ‘Mean’ even the statisticians mean the Average…or the arithmetic mean we all know since early childhood. We continue use it because while […]
Predicting missing/unknown information
Analysts often need to fill in the blanks in order to make longer-term decisions, or just to model different scenarios by making credulous predictions. In this post, I share just one of such scenarios and demonstrate how to make predictions using both statistical formulas manually and Excel’s feature. Lastly, we’ll see the difference between the […]
Bars within bars: Creating an Effectual Custom Chart
In this post, I’ll share some tips on how to create a visually impactful bar chart, rather bars within a bar in Excel that does not come out of the box, that can convey much information in an uncluttered way. There are several steps we need to take in order to take Excel’s built-in charts […]
Company and stock information in Excel
Excel makes it really simple to pull in latest stock information including its one-year price history, company description, even number of employees and more. In this post, I share a sample table with the latest data at the time of writing. The table below shows some of the information that are dynamic, real-time: It shows […]
How to treat Excel like a database to do complex SQL-like queries
One of the most under-utilized, most powerful query features come from Excel’s database functions. While primary usage of Excel is more as a traditional spreadsheet, and it myriad of formulas (and VBA macros), the database functions allow us to treat it like a database and query from its dataset much like SQL statements would from […]
A Risk Assessment Map—my approach
I’ve seen many pretty risk assessment maps over time. The issue I see with most of them is that they’re more of an illustration than a method meaning, they’re customized visuals with manual graphics that don’t scale well for different projects. In the post, I’ll share my approach…it’s based on applying basic statistical concept, development […]
Measuring and visualizing performance from raw transactions
Scenario We have transactional data for 3 months. We want to compare any month’s sales performance with our goals by category of products sold. The following information is available in one dataset: OrderID, Product, qty, price, date of order as they occurred. As we see below, they’re not tallied or grouped or sorted in any […]
Using Stock Price Charts On Humans
Using the same dataset, I’ve shown in my earlier blog: Scattered Data To A Butterfly, Or A Tornado! https://flyingsalmon.net/blog/?p=2194 on how to present similar information visually and add interactivity, in this post, I’ll show other ways to present the information visually and walk through the pros and cons of each. I won’t be using any […]
Scattered Data to a Butterfly, or a Tornado!
What do butterflies and tornadoes have in common? 🙂 Butterfly charts aka Tornado charts are a special type of Bar chart where the data categories are listed vertically instead of the usual horizontal layout. It’s suitable for comparing different variables between two groups (e.g. male/female, apartment/house, car/boat, etc. etc.) and what variables you measure is […]